Hay Fever

Gate Theatre, Dublin

“Her sense of the theatre is always fatal,” says one character of Judith Bliss, a retired actress in Noël Coward’s 1925 comedy who has never quite left the stage. In fact, everyone in the Bliss family is an incurable performer, lost in acts of flaring passion, toxic self-involvement and utter irresponsibility in their rambling estate.

Director Patrick Mason’s sense of the theatre is more encouraging, and here he uses it to provide the play with an appropriately self-reflexive frame: each act begins and ends with a character drawing a curtain across the scene, as though stage-managing their own drama.

Otherwise he’s inclined to indulge the Blisses, fascinated by their bohemian sensibility (vividly realised in set and costume) without twisting their eccentricities towards the surreal, or even the sociopathic.

The consequence is that the play, dashed off by Coward in one weekend, remains a precious period sketch with little new edge to sharpen its comedy or freshen its relevance. If you want people to get Hay Fever, you need to raise the pollen count.

Each of the family has invited a guest for the weekend without consulting the others. Only one of the Blisses, however, Beth Cooke’s carefully enunciating Sorrell, is determined to play by social rules. “Abnormal, Simon – that’s what we are.”

Indeed, Simon is a case in point, enjoyably played by Marty Rea as an emotional volcano with frequent eruptions, while Stephen Brennan does a nice line in aloof exasperation as novelist father David and Ingrid Craigie floats by, airy and appealing, on Judith’s cloud of self-regard.

If the play won’t supply the amperage of farce, it’s because Coward’s comedy of social transgression is measured out in awkward silences or roiling tantrums, romantic overtures and detailed arguments about curing hiccups.

With such low stakes, the production’s few funny moments come from physical embellishments by the cast, rootless bits of business that don’t complement the play as much as compensate for it.

“You’re artificial to the point of lunacy,” says Jade Yourell’s raven-dark Myra, and she has a point.

Only when Craigie, Rea and Cooke launch into a febrile melodrama that is not hugely unlike their daily behaviour, do you get a glimpse of something unsettlingly hollow in this “act” of living.

Instead, it’s up to the guests to suggest that shiver of horror: Stephen Swift’s dandy shovelling a furtive breakfast into his mouth like a commando; Kathy-Rose O’Brien’s flapper wearing a strained smile over an impending nervous breakdown; or Mark O’Halloran’s thinly moustachioed “diplomatist” crumpling over each faux pas.

The handsome clutter of Michael Pavelka’s set and luxuriously detailed costumes from Eimer Ní Mhaoldomhnaigh underscore the attractiveness of Coward’s beautiful, pointless people. But as the guests finally tiptoe away from the Bliss family causing them barely a ripple of distress, their final indifference says it all. Who cares?

Until 24 Sep