Hay Fever (play)

Hay Fever is a comic play written by Noël Coward in 1924. Its first production was in the West End in 1925 with Marie Tempest as Judith Bliss. A cross between high farce and a comedy of manners, the play is set in an English country house in the 1920s, and deals with the four eccentric members of the Bliss family and their outlandish behaviour when they each invite a guest to spend the weekend. The self-centred behaviour of the hosts finally drives their guests to flee while the Blisses are so engaged in a family row that they do not notice their guests' furtive departure.

The play's original production opened in London in 1925 and ran for 337 performances. Coward wrote the piece with Tempest in mind for the central role of Judith. In later productions the part has been played by actresses including Constance Collier, Edith Evans, Constance Cummings, Rosemary Harris, Judi Dench, Geraldine McEwan and Felicity Kendal. Hay Fever has been continually revived in Britain, the US and elsewhere, and has been adapted frequently for radio and television.

In 1921 Coward first visited New York, hoping to interest American producers in his plays. During that summer he became a friend of the playwright Hartley Manners and his wife, the eccentric actress Laurette Taylor. Coward wrote, "It was inevitable that someone should eventually utilise portions of this eccentricity in a play, and I am only grateful to Fate that no guest of the Hartley Manners thought of writing Hay Fever before I did". Coward's biographer Philip Hoare and others also note elements of Evangeline Astley Cooper – an English eccentric of whom the young Coward was a protégé – in the central character, Judith Bliss. The two women reacted very differently to Coward's caricature of them. Taylor was offended (either by Coward's Judith or the overplaying of the role in the Broadway production, or both), and Cooper was much amused.

Coward wrote the play in three days in 1924, at first giving it the title Still Life before adopting Hay Fever prior to the first production. He intended the star role, Judith, for the actress Marie Tempest, "whom I revered and adored". Though she found it amusing, she thought it not substantial enough for a whole evening, but changed her mind after the success of Coward's The Vortex later in 1924.

Coward introduces one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of the play, where the four guests tiptoe out as the curtain falls, leaving disorder behind them – a device that he also used in various forms in Present Laughter, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit.

Hay Fever opened at the Ambassadors Theatre on 8 June 1925, directed by Coward, and transferred to the larger Criterion Theatre on 7 September 1925; it ran for 337 performances. Coward remembered in 1964 that the notices "were amiable and well-disposed although far from effusive. It was noted, as indeed it has been today, that the play had no plot and that there were few if any 'witty' lines." Hay Fever opened the same year at the Maxine Elliott Theatre in New York; the star, Laura Hope Crews, was accused of over-acting, not all the supporting cast were competent, and the production closed after 49 performances.

The original casts in London and New York were:

The action is set in the Hall of David Bliss's house at Cookham, Berkshire, by the River Thames.