Noel Coward's HAY FEVER Comes to UCSB's Performing Arts Theater in November

Flowers bloom, bees buzz, fur flies and games are afoot during a weekend at the Bliss country estate in the idyllic English countryside. Judith Bliss, recently retired grande dame of the theatre, David Bliss, her pop novelist husband, and their two volatile children Simon and Sorel, host a group of guests for a clandestine and peaceful weekend which spirals into a whirlwind of unmannered madness. How will the four fawning and unsuspecting guests survive the whiplash of family cat-fights, alarmingly bare cupboards and sleeping in the boiler room? Experience Noël Coward’s 1924 comedic masterpiece Hay Fever, a posh romp set amid a backdrop of motor cars, slinky gowns, pithy repartee, pots of tea, bobbed hair, and hiccups, making its way to UCSB’s Performing Arts Theater November 14 – 19, 2023. 

The second theater production in UCSB Theater/Dance’s 2023-24 Season, Hay Fever is a comedy of Blissfully bad manners that you won’t want to miss. Directed by UCSB’s Julie Fishell, this production uplifts the heightened theatricality of Noël Coward’s playwrighting and satisfies our very human, seemingly inexhaustible, social media-fueled curiosity about the lives of the rich and famous. 

“This production will celebrate the sparkling verbal gymnastics of Coward’s language and the absurdity created by self-conscious physical restraint,” shares director Fishell. “The show’s designs are arrestingly gorgeous, historically detailed, and unpredictably playful all at once. They physicalize Victorian values giving way to the crackle and roar of the 1920’s.” While Hay Fever, as most of Coward’s other works, is most often performed on a proscenium stage, Julie Fishell directs this production in UCSB’s black box theater. This intimate setting casts the audience as part of the structure of the home – both the walls and the flies on them, so to speak.

Hay Fever is a play about a moment when your dream becomes your nightmare – the esteemed guests of the Bliss family, who were invited for a weekend of fun and relaxation, are quickly tasked to unravel what is reality and what is fiction. Written in just three days, Noël Coward wrote Hay Fever based on the shenanigans he observed while visiting famous American actress Laurette Taylor and her family.  The New York premiere of Hay Fever took place in 1926, and that same year, and at the age of just 27, Noël Coward became the highest-paid writer in the world.  

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