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...
‘This place instilled constant fear in us’: the man who lived next door to the brutal Homs security unit for 50 years
For 50 years Taha Tadmori had a window to the surveillance complex of the Assad regime. As Syria starts a new chapter, he recalls the horrors he witnessed and the family he lost
The three floors and subterranean prison of the Homs security directorate have loomed over 65-year-old Taha Tadmori’s daily life since he was a teenager. His family often shut their window blinds and doors in an attempt to block out the constant sound of screams and cries of pain from the facility’s basement prison, loud enough to reach their third-floor apartment overlooking it.
The moustachioed man with a gentle smile was 15 when he watched the construction of the neighbouring building that would later terrorise him and other people in Homs.
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