Noel Coward (1899-1973) made his professional acting debut at age 12 and wrote his first play, Rat Trap, at age 18. I Leave It to You, his first full-length play in which he also played a leading role, was produced in the West End in 1920 to much acclaim. His young age made London producers nervous about backing his writing, but he persisted until 1924 brought him fame and fortune with The Vortex, a drama dealing with sexual affairs and drug use in the upper classes. Within the year, he had several play running in London and a batch o f songs produced in revues in England and America. Coward’s most successful plays were written during the tumultuous year of the 1930s and 40s. While economic depression and war prevailed in the real world, Coward’s writing for the theatre managed to entertain and amuse audiences with hits such as Private Lives, Design for Living and Blithe Spirit.
Noel Coward’s plays epitomize the sophisticated wit of the era, and Hay Fever, a comedy of manners about a family whose theatrical excesses torment a group of unsuspecting visitors, epitomizes the Coward play. Considered by many to be cleverly constructed, wittily written, slightly synical and undeniably entertaining, the work contains all the elements that would help establish Coward’s reputation as a playwright.
HAY FEVER was written by Noel Coward in 1924, at the age of 25, over the course of only three days. Mr. Coward notes:
“Hay Fever is considered by many to be my best comedy. Whether or not this assertion is true, posterity, if it gives it a glance, will be able to judge with more detachment than I. At any rate it has certainly proved to be a great joy to amateurs, owing, I suppose, to the smallness of its cast, and the fact that it has only one set, which must lead them, poor dears, to imagine that it is easy to act. This species of delusion being common to amateurs all over the world, no word of mine shall be spoken, no warning finger of experience raised, to discourage them, beyond the timorous suggestion that from the professional standpoint HAY EVER is far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever encountered. To begin with, it has no plot at all, and remarkably little action.
Its general effectiveness therefore depends upon expert technique from each and every member of the cast. The level of acting in the original London production, led brilliantly by Miss Marie Tempest, was extremely high, consequently the play was a tremendous success. The press naturally and inevitably described it as “thin,” “tenuous,” and “trivial,” because those are their stock phrases for anything later in date and ligther in texture then The Way of the World, and it ran, tenuously and triumphantly for a year.
In America it fared less well. Miss Laura Hope Crews was enthusiastically torn to shreds by the critics for overacting, which indeed she did, but with the very extenuating circumstances that her supporting cast was so uniformly dreary that if she hadn’t, I gravely doubt if any of the audience would have stayed in the theatre at all. I am very much attached to Hay Fever. I enjoyed writing it and producing it, and I have frequently enjoyed watching it.”
–Noel Coward, introduction to Play Parade 1938
Laurette Taylor and Hartley Manners returned to town from the country with Dwight and Marguerite, Laurette’s children by her first marriage, and settled themselves into an odd demi-Gothic edifice on Riverside Drive in New York.
On Sunday evenings up on Riverside Drive we had cold supper and played games, often rather acrimonious games, owing to Laurette’s abrupt disapproval of any quest (whether invited by Hartley, Marguerite, Dwight, or herself) who turned out to be self-conscious, nervous, or unable to act an adverb or an historical personage with proper abandon. There was also, very often, shrill arguments concerning rules. These were waged entirely among the family, and frequently ended in all four of them leaving the room and retiring upstairs, where, later on, they might be discovered by any quest bold enough to go in search of them, amicably drinking tea in the kitchen.
It was inevitably that someone should eventually utilize portions of this eccentricity in a play, and I am only grateful to Fate that no quest of the Hartley Manners thought of writing Hay Fever before I did….”
–Noel Coward, Present Indicative, London 1937
“The idea came to me suddenly in the garden, and I finished it in about three days, a fact which later on, when I had become news value, seemed to excite gossip-writers inordinately, although why the public should care whether a play takes three days or three years to write I shall never understand. Perhaps they don’t. However, when I had finished it and had it neatly typed and bound up, I read it through and was rather unimpressed with it. This was an odd sensation for me, as in those days I was almost always enchanted with everything I wrote. I knew certain scenes were good, especially the breakfast scene in the last act, and the dialogue between the giggling flapper and the diplomat in the first act, but apart from these it seemed to me a little tedious. I think that the reason for this was that I was passing through a transition stage as a writer; my dialogue was becoming more natural and less elaborate, and I was beginning to concentrate more on the comedy values of the situation rather than the comedy values of actual lines. I expect that, when I read through Hay Fever that first time, I was subconsciously bemoaning its lack of snappy epigrams.”
Though the audiences were unanimous in their ovations, the critics at the time were not quite sure what to make of the play. James Agate, for the London Sunday Times wrote: Mr. Coward is credited with the capacity of turning out these highly-polished pieces of writing in an incredibly short time, and if rumor and the illustrated weeklies are to be believed, he writes his plays in a flowered dressing-gown and before breakfast. But what I want to know is what kind of work he intends to do after breakfast, when he is clothed and in his right mind.” Thankfully we’ll never know….
And with that, we give you HAY FEVER.
