Noel Coward's Hay Fever and the Dysfunctional Family

Introduction: The Dysfunctional Family in Hay Fever

The dysfunctional family is a subject ripe for parody and one commonly given scrutiny in modern comedy and melodrama. However, this subject was perhaps less frequently explored in the public forum a century ago. Thus, legendary British playwright and performer Noël Coward's 1925 breakthrough play, Hay Fever, is prescient in the farcical manner with which it addresses this issue. For Coward, the dysfunctional family unit becomes an insulated collection of marginally disturbed individuals persisting on their own internal dynamic and with little to no regard for the perceptions of others. Indeed, through the Bliss family, Coward offers a glimpse into the bizarre and deluded lives of those in high society, commenting on the social disengagement produced by their status.

This is perhaps best demonstrated through the character of Judith, a faded actress whose penchant for melodrama has literally infected all the members of her family. Their engagement of the guests unwittingly invited to the country house for the weekend leaves the impression of having been some sort of mad parlor game. However, as the first act of the play reveals, the Bliss family is very much prone to the same eccentricities and off-kilter behavior even in the absence of their guests.

Judith Bliss and the Theatrics of Social Failure

In modern productions of the play, it is the character of Judith that tends to drive the action, with her imposing, dominant, and flamboyant personality often crowding the stage to distressing effect. As the review of a recent revival indicates, the audience is made to feel an exhilarating sense of discomfort from a distance, while the guests invited by the Bliss family must endure this discomfort in direct confrontation. As Kellaway (2012) tells, the character of Judith is the preeminent force in promoting this discomfort. According to Kellaway's review of a production running in London's Noël Coward Theatre:

"Lindsay Duncan is hostess — although as Judith Bliss, self-absorbed ex-actress, she can't always be bothered to greet her guests. When she's not struggling to learn the names of flowers in her garden, she's occupied with testing her middle-aged powers as seductress. In frisky knee-length breeches, sunhat and quaint, buckled shoes, she is a delicious example of someone unable to consign herself to the wings. Duncan's performance matches her character's surname." (Kellaway, p. 1)

The presentation of a hostess who is more enraptured by her own antics and those of her fractured family than by the impressions and experiences of her guests is in many ways the centerpiece of a play about social deficiency, familial isolation, and the degree to which wealth, success, and status might otherwise protect one from the pressures of learning grace or decorum. Quite indeed, Judith is every bit an exemplar of the correlation between ignorance and Bliss. She has also effectively passed these traits on to her children, who behave in much the same irrational way with the various guests that they have selected to entertain. Each guest engages in light flirtation with a different member of the family, only to find each member equally prone to seemingly incongruous displays of being flustered, confused, and impassioned.

The Bliss Children and Self-Aware Dysfunction

A spot of dialogue between Simon and Sorel underscores this sentiment. Here, Sorel asserts, "I sometimes wish we were more normal and bouncing, Simon." When Simon presses her on this proclamation, she tells him, "I should like to be a fresh, open-air girl with a passion for games." Simon retorts, "Thank God you're not." (Coward, p. 6)

In this rather humorous exchange, Sorel actually shows some level of self-awareness, suggesting that the insular and dysfunctional nature of the family — generally couched in its elitist sense of artistic intellectualism — does detain her from a certain freedom and abandon. Still, as the unfolding of events thereafter will demonstrate, this self-awareness is not strong enough to prevent her from performing to the will of her eccentric mother. In fact, one might argue that she and the rest of the Bliss family are only intensified in their desire to display their eccentricities by the presence of their unsuspecting guests. This is a type of familial dysfunction that is actually quite familiar within the scope of public life today. Indeed, the prescience of Coward's work is not so much in his exploration of high society but in the way that he deconstructs the oddness of family dynamics.

Conclusion: Timeless Dysfunction and the Bliss Legacy

To this end, the Bliss family is strangely modern in the detachment which its members display toward one another and toward their guests. Like those who present themselves so nakedly on television and in public life today, the family at the center of the Coward play seems blissfully uninterested in how it is perceived by others, so long as others are paying attention. And to credit Coward's perceptiveness, it is compelling that in the absence of its departed audience, the members of the Bliss family would continue their deranged performance for one another, truly indulging unabashedly in their dysfunction. Hay Fever endures because the Bliss family, for all its Edwardian excess, reflects something achingly recognizable about how families perform themselves — for guests, for the public, and ultimately for each other.