✭✭✭✭✭

by Noel Coward, directed by Christopher Newton

Shaw Festival, Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake

August 16-November 24, 2002

"Sheer Bliss"

Christopher Newton is exiting the Shaw Festival on a high note.  The last production at the Shaw that he is directing as Artistic Director is Noel Coward’s classic comedy “Hay Fever” and it is a delight from beginning to end.  The direction, action and design are so perfect, one can’t imagine a better production anywhere 

“Hay Fever” (1925) is considered Coward’s purest comedy.  It has virtually no plot.  The four members of the Bliss family each unbeknownst to the others, invites a guest to stay for the weekend, the guest arrive, are dismayed my the family and leave.  Hanging from this thin thread is a comedy about acting, about the theatre, about relation of art and reality. 

Judith Bliss is famous actress who has retired from the stage.  Theatre is in her blood and is festering in isolation of the country.  Consequently she theatricalizes her everyday life.  The simplest occurrence, a boy kissing her daughter, is occasion for a dramatic scene, that is when she is not actually playing scenes from her past successes with her family.  The role could have been written for Fiona Reid.  She is perfectly in her element and gives a performance to treasure.  She is alive to every quirk in Judith’s self-absorbed, mercurial nature and proves yet again what a master of comic timing she is.  While she clearly distinguishes Judith’s many levels of play-acting, she shows that Judith is so accustomed to dramatizing every element of her life, even when the mask supposedly falls and she faces the reality of ageing, there may actually be no moment when she is not acting.  Reid’s is a great performance of a great role.

The rest of the Bliss family may complain of Judith’s making a scene of everything, but they are only different from her in degree.  As often as not, they collude with her scenes and creates scenes of their own.  David Bliss, her husband, is so preoccupied writing his novels he hardly interacts with the real people around him.  Michael Ball, looking younger and more sprightly, has just the right degree of absent-mindedness to make David’s lapses into his own scene-making believable and hilarious. 

Mike Shara and Severn Thompson are well cast as the two Bliss children, Simon and Sorel.  Their performances are so finely detailed they show us both the traits they share as siblings and the traits their brother and sister and the traits that make them individuals.  As the artistic Simon Shara is a lankier, more volatile version of his father.  As Sorel, Thompson has the rare chance to display her fine comedic talents.  Sorel is the only one of the Blisses who longs to be part of a “normal” family.  Yet when cues for a scene are given Thompson shows that Sorel lets herself get drawn in despite herself.

The four guests the Blisses have separately invited become objects of humour as they each attempt to cope with bizarre alternate universe of their hosts.  Indeed, their hosts are so self-obsessed they either ignore the guests or treat them as human playthings.  Judith has invited a young athlete, Sandy Tyrell, because is adoration makes her feel youthful.  David has invited a young flapper, Jackie Coryton, to use a character study for his novel.  Simon and Sorel have both invited older admirers, Simon the stylish Myra Arundel and Sorel the diplomat Richard Greatham.  Soon enough the partners have reassorted according to age, multiple scenes of recrimination and forgiveness follow while the guests band together to plan their escape from the madhouse. 

Like the Bliss family all four are perfectly cast.  Kevin Bundy shows a flair for physical comedy as the oafish puppy dog Sandy.  Lisa Norton makes the Jackie look like a shy little girl lost in a funhouse.  Laurie Paton’s Myra is sophisticate and catty and not used to being unnoticed.  David Schurmann’s Richard is well-meaning and restrained and unprepared for a family where hysterics are a familiar event.  Mary Haney gives us another of her hilariously sullen domestics as the Bliss’s maid Clara.   

         

Newton probably understands how to direct Coward better than anyone in the country.  He has made the Shaw Festival the leading producer of Coward in the world with 13 productions in his tenure alone.  He draws incredibly detailed performances from this dream cast.  He has brought out all the nuances of the characters’ interactions and makes that the motor of the play.  Unlike the “other festival” where directors slather on the gimmicks in a vain effort to make comedies funnier, Newton allows the play to breathe out its own abundant humour and making the experience all the richer.  The greatest set pice of the production is the scene at the start of Act 3 when the guests sneak down to have breakfast quickly before they sneak away.  In this largely silent scene Newton has extrapolated precisely how each of the four guests will react to the Blisses’ booby-trapped breakfast buffet.  Their different reactions to scalding lids and sticky spigots sums up in riotous fashion their difficulties in a world with its own unexplained rules. 

Newton knows exactly how to pace the work and build to a climax.  He also knows the profundities that lies beneath the shimmering surface of the play.  Playing a word game involving acting starts off Act 2, but Newton knows that Coward is examining how much game-playing is part of “real” life.  He knows that the guests in arriving at the Blisses’ house have actually stumbled into a theatre where a play is in progress in which they are asked to play unaccustomed roles.

William Schmuck has designed a beautiful set of the Blisses’ house decorated to bring out their bohemian lives and eccentricity.  The wonderful array of costumes suits the nature of each character and sets the tone for each act.  Alan Brodie’s lighting is very effective in creating mood.  In Act 2 he conjures up exactly the look and feel of light before a storm.   

This is a production that would win raves anywhere in the world and it’s just down in Niagara-on-the-Lake.  Don’t miss it.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Mike Shara, Fiona Reid and Severn Thompson. ©2002 David Cooper.