Hay Fever

In 2020, an extraordinary album of photographs was found of Noël Coward and his friends and lovers at his country retreat in Kent in 1931. Coward and cohort look relaxed and joyful, flamboyant and quite openly gay. But it was a life he could never have referenced in his public persona or his work, for obvious reasons. A core part of his very identity was illegal. Like writers in a repressive regime, Coward had to veil his reality without breaking social mores. This can be seen in Hay Fever, which Coward wrote with heterosexual couplings and a certain coyness. Sorel and Sandy only ever canoodle in the library, and we’re led to believe Simon and Jackie only kiss before Simon announces their engagement. Coward sets his characters in a socially acceptable world with the assumption that only those outside norms would read between the lines. It may look like the 1920s, but it’s in fact a curiously chaste parallel universe.

The beauty of ACT HUB’s production was that it was also a parallel universe but at the opposite extreme—one where rights and freedoms we’ve come to take for granted in the 2020s existed in the 1920s. Frank Bliss becomes Frances Bliss, the butch to Judith’s bitch. In director Joel Horwood’s reimagining, this long-married lesbian couple is out, proud and accepted far more than the suggestion of a game of mahjong. It follows that Sandy is a woman, which means that Jackie must be a man (the names are already handily androgenous). Horwood has also pulled some sexuality out of the subtext with Simon and Myra leaving no doubt about their offstage intentions. Once you have accepted these wistful tweaks, the rest followed naturally.

Other aspects of the production were lovingly faithful to the script, from the 1920s décor and music, the glamourous costuming, right down to maintaining the original three acts (which, along with one slight accent glitch would be the only complaint I would have). The humour was pitched beautifully, with not a beat missed. Holly Ross and Glenn Brighenti as indolent and spoiled Sorel and Simon aced their comic exchanges. Tracy Noble’s sex-goddess Myra was a fine balance of worldliness and bewilderment at confabulations of the prickly and self-absorbed Frances (Steph Roberts). Meaghan Stewart’s no-nonsense, outdoorsy Sandy Tyrell, Robbie Haltiner’s awkward Jackie Coryton, Alice Ferguson’s bemused maid Clara and Joe Dinn’s diplomatic bore Richard Greatham were all gurning their socks off—Joe Dinn’s hilarious facial expressions alone deserve their own character credit. And of course, outshining all of them was the utterly fabulous Andrea Close, whose depiction of Judith Bliss combined melodrama, gesticulation, physicality, timing and rather impressive winged eyeliner.

Riotous, brilliant, vibrant, clever, sexy and brave, this production of Hay Fever was a breath of pollen-free air.

Cathy Bannister