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...
The former military officer, previously known only as ‘Caesar’, smuggled evidence of thousands of deaths out of the country
A former Assad regime military officer who defected with a trove of evidence exposing the torture and killing of thousands has called on the US to repeal a raft of sanctions imposed on Syria, in an interview with Al Jazeera on Thursday.
The military officer, known only by the codename “Caesar” until now, also revealed his identity as Farid Nada al-Madhan, the head of the judicial department for the military police in Damascus.
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