Wyndham’s theatre, London Grant brings shock-haired vigour as a vain novelist forced to welcome his boho children’s surprise guests in comedy of clipped social embarrassment Hay Fever, now one of Noël Coward’s best-known and most-performed works, hasn’t always been a smash hit. British critics who found its West End debut in 1925 amusing enough nevertheless noted its lack of plot, and the first Broadway production was a flop. A critic for Vogue called it “funny in places”, which sounds like the kind of stinging putdown you’d expect from the playwright’s own hand. A century of performances have proved the play’s lasting power, but its comic effect has always lain less in the words as written than their delivery – it is, after all, about a family that is “artificial to the point of lunacy”. At their centre is diva Judith Bliss, who has retired from the stage to take up the role of country hostess. When she, her husband and their self-consciously bohemian childre...
Matthew Flinders, the flute-playing, cat-loving explorer who circumnavigated Australia, is going home – but what of his envoy Bungaree?
As the British navigator is reburied with pomp and ceremony in his village church, Aboriginal Australians call for respect for the ‘incredibly brave’ man who made the voyage possible
For someone who dedicated his life to finding, navigating and mapping things, it was unfortunate that Matthew Flinders’ body was lost for the better part of 200 years.
Archaeologists announced in 2019 they had rediscovered the grave of the first man known to have circumnavigated Australia, while digging under a park behind London’s Euston station during excavations for the HS2 high-speed rail line.
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