Play

Hay Fever

Coward's 1924 comedy follows a weekend visit to a chaotic artistic family — the theatrical Bliss household — that systematically baffles and alienates their successive guests through a combination of neurotic self-absorption and complete indifference to social convention. The play operates as a comic demonstration of how a family whose members live entirely in their own theatrical self-image can render outsiders invisible. Coward wrote it in three days; it has never left the repertoire. Dame Edith Evans refused the role of Judith Bliss, saying there were no good parts for women in it — an assessment that baffled everyone who has seen the play.