Hay Fever

The Bliss family is theatrical in the most exhausting sense: ego-maniacal actors Judith and David, their diva daughter Sorel, and precious son Simon, each have invited guests to their country house for the weekend without telling the others. When all four strangers arrive simultaneously, the family's instinct for drama transforms a simple weekend into a spectacular disaster. Everyone is pursuing someone who is pursuing someone else. Secrets pile up. Jealousies flare. The hapless guests, proper Myra, buttoned-up Richard, flighty Jackie, and charmingly dim Sandy, find themselves trapped in a cyclone of exaggerated emotion and performed feeling, unable to tell when the Blisses are being sincere and when they're just showing off. Coward's 1925 masterpiece gleefully demolishes the English country house comedy by making its characters too clever by half and caring far more about the performance than the person. It is, in essence, a farce about people who cannot stop performing, even when the curtain has already fallen.