Hay Fever ★★★★ Wyndham’s Theatre | Sep 22 - Dec 12, 2026

The premise is wonderfully simple. When four guests descend on the Bliss family for a quiet weekend in the country, things turn out to be considerably less than blissful. Judith, who has retired from the theatre, is finding the pleasures of rustic life no substitute for the satisfactions of the stage. She has invited down a young man who can provide the adulation she once enjoyed in her career. At the same time, her novelist husband David has asked a young woman to join them, hoping she might provide him with a model for the flapper in his latest novel. Add to this ménage their children’s invitations to two apparently unsuitable suitors and you have the makings of one of Noël Coward’s most successful farces. The hapless guests find themselves trapped in a family whose artistic members constantly turn their reality into a performance, with all the histrionics and artifice that entails. Coward is satirising not only the conventions of the theatre, with its exaggeration and falsification of real emotion, but also the performative nature of so much human interaction. As Oscar Wilde wrote, “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” In Hay Fever, that maxim becomes the source of much of the laughter, and the familiar meta-theatrical device genuinely works. We find ourselves watching a play about people whose lives themselves become a kind of play. It is a comic conceit which should prompt us to question the nature of our own reality and the posturing it entails. Indeed, Coward’s use of the meta-theatrical trope, so overused in today’s theatre, is actually apt. Here, the characters’ constant performing raises questions about the boundary between performance and what we call reality. Kudos to director Emily Burns, who makes us believe in and draws us into this wonderfully artificial world of Coward’s. The casting is also pitch-perfect. Christine Baranski is delicious as the self-obsessed Judith Bliss, effortlessly combining hauteur, vanity and theatrical self-dramatisation. Richard E. Grant is hilarious as her eccentric husband David, giving his self-absorption an appealing lightness while finding the comic rhythm in his every pronouncement. The rest of the cast is equally assured, each performer contributing a distinct personality to the escalating absurdity without losing sight of the farce’s carefully judged pace and precision. Likewise, Frankie Bradshaw’s country-house set is a crucial part of the production’s comic machinery, providing the appropriately enclosed environment in which the Blisses can act out their elaborate games as their guests become increasingly desperate to escape. With its requisite number of doors, the set supplies the essential mechanics of farce, allowing entrances, exits, interruptions and misunderstandings to build with clockwork precision. In this thoroughly entertaining production, Coward’s satiric commentary is fully realised. The guests may think they have finally escaped the madness, but Judith’s final declaration, “I really am going to return to the stage!”, might leave the audience laughing while also wondering where reality ends and performance begins.

Rated: ★★★★

Reviewed by J.C.

Photo by Marc Brenner

When, Where, Getting there:

• Sep 22 - Dec 12, 2026
• Mon - Sat: 7:30 pm, Wed & Sat: 2:30 pm
• Wyndham's Theatre
• Nearest tube: Leicester Square
• https://www.wyndhamstheatre.co.uk/whats-on/hay-fever