Coward comedy’s flights of fancy don’t quite get off the ground in well-meaning production

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This article was published 28/01/2015 (3369 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Noel Coward warned all comers intent on reviving his 1925 farce, Hay Fever, that it “was one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have ever encountered.”

What appears to be a deceptively simple piece — a comedy set at a country-house party in which very little happens, but at a tremendous speed — is difficult to pull off without its flimsy surface cracking under the weight of over-acting. It needs considerable inventiveness to keep it airborne.

The student cast of the University of Manitoba’s Black Hole Theatre Company, under director Margaret Groome, only periodically captures the elusive comic sense that allows Hay Fever to take flight on its gossamer wings. The CowardFest production, with set and costumes that provide flapper-era visual flair, could use more of what is called comic business to fill in the plotless mould.

Still, there is fun to be had for the audience when visiting the bad-mannered Bliss family — former-actress mother Judith, novelist father David and two noisily temperamental grown children, Sorel and Simon. Unbeknownst to each other, they have each invited a guest, perhaps a secret lover, for the weekend. The guests arrive, three of them flush with expectations, with the fourth, Jackie Coryton, full of quivering misgivings.

The visitors are ignored one moment, overwhelmed with attention the next, then forced to play some esoteric game then don’t understand before they become unwittingly involved in unwanted dramatizations of family hostilities. The Bliss family bring no joy to anyone — except themselves and the audience.

The most Bliss-ful is Judith, whose heart has never left the stage. She is ever so melodramatic, dah-ling, as well as unbearably eccentric and neurotic. Lulu Akhanamoya is too young to play a retired diva, but still manges to turn Judith’s every encounter into an excuse for a third-rate dramatic scene. The student actor makes much of a scene in which Judith grandly goes to the piano to sing and then warbles a hilariously pathetic Frère Jacques. It neatly brings home the truth of her current position: there will not be a second act to her career.

Compare that to a later scene, when diplomat Richard Greatham knocks a barometer off the wall and, instead of making something of the moment, sheepishly places it on the piano, leaving viewers to wander what that was all about. There are many missed opportunities to heighten the physical comedy with visual gags.

The player who most fits her role is Kerensa Peters as Sorel, who is half-yearning to be normal and proves the most self-aware character in the play. She was natural and convincing, unlike her paramour and her mother’s admirer, Sandy Tyrell, who fails to make a strong impression. Rowan Gannon’s Jackie is funny, a mousey flapper trying desperately to maintain her poise and whose body language is a desperate cry for help. Ian Bastin’s Richard rises to the occasion when the diplomat is snared in Judith’s one-woman soap opera, and later endures a night in “Little Hell.”

The third-act mass exodus on Sunday earns some chuckles, as the guests creep down for breakfast (in the living room?), jumpy at the prospect of running into a Bliss. The audience, however, is more tolerant of these frivolous people, who see their atrocious behaviour as a gesture of defiance aimed at a conventional world.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca