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...
In an age dominated by T20, New Zealand’s long-form Plunket Shield is a throwback to another time and retains a small group of committed fans
From the spot where Helen Julius spread her arms across the peeling, sun-flecked green paint of the pavilion’s bench seats, Eden Park’s Outer Oval in Auckland was almost picturesque.
There were the white-clad cricketers – Auckland batting, Canterbury in the field – and a bank of agapanthus just beginning to break out in flower beyond the sight-screen on the ground’s northern boundary. Sparrows, nesting in the pavilion roof, chattered incessantly.
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