one of the finest comedies ever written -- if not the finest comedy of all. Coward wrote it in a day or two, apparently --when he was 21. He had been staying at a country home just outside of New York City, with Hartley Manners and his wife Laurette Taylor. That Judith Bliss — the crazy, melodramatic, aging actress in Hay Fever — is based on Laurette Taylor, is a little known but fascinating tidbit of thespian lore. Laurette Taylor was one of the finest actresses in the American theatre — in fact she is reported by all who saw her perform to have fundamentally changed the face of the art. She created the role of Amanda in The Glass Menagerie, and was, apparently the ‘Marlon Brando ‘of her time (Williams characters had a way of calling up a certain kind of brutal realism from the actors in his plays). Taylor was never in a movie (I found one of her old screen tests somewhere online; it now seems to have disappeared, or is only ‘play for pay’). According to actor Martin Landau (who died at the ripe old age of 89 in 2017) Taylor was so real onstage that it appeared she had just walked off the street and wandered onto the set. In ‘real life’ — whatever she could stand of it — she was often drunk. Judith Bliss (the character in Hay Fever that Coward based upon Taylor) is the very opposite of of a ‘realistic’ actress — at least if the acting she does when she breaks into a speech from one of her theatrical hits during the course of the play, is any clue. So, somehow, Coward found his inspiration for the over-the-top Judith Bliss in the most naturalistic actress to ever grace the American stage. No doubt he considered the play a trifle. It presented a conundrum for actress Marie Tempest (the first Judith Bliss) who couldn’t get her head around its lack of epigrams. Coward too was terrified by the new, innovative comedy he had invented. Wilde and Maugham were masters at wielding the epigram; actors regaled their audiences with paradoxes — or in the case of Maugham, with weighty, pithy, and balanced pronouncements. Coward’s comedy was, for it’s time, remarkable conversational (though it may seem somewhat mannered to us now). In fact some patrons who saw Coward and Lawrence in Private Lives thought that they were a real life couple improvising on stage. Coward’s genius is related to Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare, too, wrote romances that are both funny and touching — and Shakespeare’s work is replete with wordplay — so much wordplay, that at times it befuddles us. Coward’s wordplay is more modern but no less unbridled — and "they that dally nicely with words may quickly make them wanton” as Viola suggests in 12th Night. Characters in Coward's plays not only play with language but analyze it. ’And so,’ the critics ask — ‘where is the drama?’ But Coward’s masterpieces don’t need much action (much to the chagrin of Aristotelians), for the tension is between the words -- as in Hay Fever where 10 minutes of the second act is caught up trying to exactly understand the meaning of the word ‘winsome.’ But there is more than that going on in Hay Fever; it has a big theme, a Shakespearean theme, one that Coward returned to in his two other masterpieces — Private Lives and Present Laughter — and that theme is very much related to Laurette Taylor and the whole notion of realism. Where does reality end, and fantasy begin? And what if fantasy is more tempting than reality —or worse still, what if we would rather not live in the ‘real world’ at all? And what if, for some reason, we feel we can’t? Shakespeare was obsessed with this issue; this may be why there is now a Noel Coward Theatre at the RSC. The fact that Coward is still dismissed as lightweight is just homophobia mixed with the blind, stupid worship of didacticism (very much a disease now). You can’t wittle a play by Coward or Shakespeare down to a moral or political imperative. And Coward seems to enjoy watching his characters brazenly flout authority and objective morality. As many have pointed out, Coward’s leading characters are the idle rich who quite often display no visible means of support, who are not very ‘nice,’ and exist in a kind of fantasyland where only words and love and — of course — banter, matter. In Private Lives when Amanda worries people might disapprove of their affair, Elyot says they are still married “according to the Catholics… Catholics don't recognise divorce.” Morality is merely and relatively pragmatic -- and frankly, so are pretty much any ideas about anything. What is not pragmatic about Coward's characters — but instead transcendent -- is their addiction to illusion (and, allusion). At the end of Hay Fever's second act everybody falls in love with someone they’re not supposed to, and Judith turns a somewhat awkward situation into a terrifying melodrama -- one which becomes very real to the spectators (i.e. the houseguests). Ultimately we are not sure (as we are not sure with Gary Essendine in Present Laughter) what reality actually consists of for Judith Bliss. Her son Simon says at one point that they all ‘play along with mother’s fantasies.' After all, father is a novelist and mother is an actress -- and the children seem pretty detached from daily life -- so all it takes is for a member of the family to ask ‘Is this a game?” to send them all off into a performance of Loves Whirlwind, a very bad play with great lines for Judith. She plays it all to the hilt, until we wish it was the truth. The one very profound idea in this play is that we are all quite capable of believing lies, and in fact prefer them to 'the real.' Watching Penelope Keith (The Good Life) as Judith Bliss, alternatively swoon, regard herself in the mirror, and switch from one dream universe to another, allowed me to live for moment during COVID-19. I guarantee that for those few moments my world was just as authentic as yours might ever be. If you disagree, I will show you mine -- and you can show me yours. And as always, the truth will come with that nakedness.
