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...
Duke of York’s theatre, London
The Captain Marvel star is a magnetic frontwoman in Daniel Fish’s radical rewiring of the ancient play
‘There’s nothing more dangerous to a warrior than emotion,” Jude Law’s Kree commander tells Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel in the film that secured her Hollywood breakthrough. Anger, he says, “only serves the enemy”.
Larson’s ancient-but-modern avenger Elektra, not an intergalactic warrior but a punk rock rebel, is nothing if not angry over the murder of her father, Agamemnon, at the hands of her mother, Clytemnestra. Emotion burns off her but serves her vengeance well enough. She looks androgynous and off-kilter with a buzz cut and a Bikini Kill T-shirt.
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