Drawing: Felicity Kendal in Hay Fever

Posted on July 14, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

felicity kendall hay fever

Following a successful run at the Theatre Royal Bath and a subsequent tour last year that included Australia, Noel Coward’s Classic comedy Hay Fever returned to the West End with Felicity Kendal in the lead role of Judith Bliss the thespian matriarch of the dysfunctional Bliss family at London’s Duke of York’s Theatre.

I loved Jane Shilling’s description in the Daily Telegraph, “her performance is a positive mille-feuille of theatricality, fading sexual allure and suppressed rage, spun around a cone of pathos.”

Apparently ‘mille-feuille’ – the classic French pastry – is having a resurgence across the UK. It’s the culinary ‘in thing’, hence the analogy… I guess.

After a splendid stage and screen career spanning 45 years, audiences and critics alike have never lost their appetite for one of Britain’s most popular performers.

Quentin Letts gave the production five stars in his Daily Mail review, stating “From the moment Miss Kendal steps through the French windows from the garden (where Judith has been trying to learn flower names) this show is a winner.”

Felicity signed this ‘Judith sketch’ I did going into the theatre for last Saturday’s matinee. As usual she was engaging, discussing the wonderful summer weather. A fellow cast member walked by and said, “wow!” referring to the drawing (I think) and Felicity said “I know!”. Hay Fever is scheduled to run until 1 August 2015.

Sketch: Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on May 7, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hay Fever Phoebe Waller Bridge

I first met the exquisite Phoebe Waller-Bridge during the revival of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre in February 2012, where she was playing the “tittering nymph” Sorel Bliss. Amongst her dialogue is the line, “I should like to be a fresh, open air girl with a passion for games”.

The Guardian’s Michael Billington said her performance, “makes something truly memorable of Judith’s daughter, whom she plays as a gauche 19 year old trying strenuously hard to be soigné and sophisticated”.

“Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s breathtaking Sorel has perfected a gauche angularity, intermittent mannishness and a toddler’s baleful pout” wrote Kate Kellaway also in The Guardian.

Seen recently on TV as the steely young lawyer Abby Thompson in the popular ITV crime drama Broadchurch, the award winning actress writiter and director will now write and star in her own E4 comedy Crashing about a group of young property guardians. In a recent interview Phoebe spoke about writing and performing and, “the tiptoeing line between laughing and crying. That, for me is the key to drama. If you make people laugh, they make themselves so vulnerable to you… and then you can stab them”.

Sketch: Jeremy Northam, Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on May 6, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hay Fever Jeremy Northam

British actor Jeremy Northam returned to London’s West End after a lengthy absence to play the bamboozled uptight diplomat Richard Greatham in the 2012 revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever at the theatre named after the celebrated playwright.

Jeremy’s stage career got off to an auspicious beginning, replacing Daniel Day Lewis in the role of Hamlet at the National in 1989 before winning an Olivier Award a year later for his performance in The Voysey Inheritance.

“A peach of a performance… quivering with shy lust,” wrote Michael Billington in The Guardian of Jeremy’s performance in Hay Fever. Among Jeremy’s many acclaimed screen roles is as Welsh actor and signer Ivor Novello in Gosford Park (2012) “I think this performance by Jeremy Northam is one of the really, best performances I’ve ever seen in film” said its director, Robert Altman.

Sketch: Amy Morgan, Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on May 5, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hay Fever Amy Morgan

TV audiences may know Welsh Amy Morgan as Mr Selfridge‘s accessories girl Grace Calthorpe gossiping among the gloves and bags, but I became aware of her acting prowess in Noel Coward’s country weekend comedy Hay Fever at London’s Noel Coward Theatre in 2012.

She played Jackie Coryton, described by critic Julia Rank, “Amy Morgan is enjoyable as the ignored dumb blonde Jackie, perhaps the most endearing character, invited so that Mr Bliss could study a flapper in domestic surroundings”.

Kate Kellaway called Amy’s performance, “wonderful” in her Guardian review. Amy won a prestigious Ian Charleson Award nomination for The Country Wife at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester She was awarded the runner up prize.

Sketch: Lindsay Duncan, Hay Fever at the Noel Coward Theatre

Posted on May 4, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hay Fever Lindsay Duncan

For his masterly revival of Hay Fever, the first Noel Coward play staged at the Noel Coward Theatre, director Howard Davies assembled a phenomenal cast, headed by the “consistently first class” Lindsay Duncan as the matriarchal Judith Bliss.

The production, which ran from February to June in 2012 reunited both director and actor who together received seven major international theatre awards for another Coward revival, Private Lives in 2001. Lindsay won her second Olivier Award for that performance opposite Alan Rickman. She also received a Tony nomination when the play transferred to Broadway.

Quentin Letts in the MailOnline opened his five star review, “behold Lindsay Duncan in full sail as Noël Coward’s nightmarish Judith Bliss”. The Telegraph’s Tim Walker added, Lindsay Duncan is on splendidly imperious form as Judith Bliss.”

Among Lindsay’s impressive CV is a little known fact that she was the voice of the android TC-14 in Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace to please her young son.

Sketch: Hay Fever at the Noël Coward Theatre

Posted on May 2, 2015 by Mark Winter / Chicane

Hay Fever

Noel Coward’s 1924 play Hay Fever is often described as the quintessential English play – a cross between high farce and a comedy of manners. It had a major West End revival at the theatre named after him in 2012.

Both The Telegraph’s critics Charles Spencer and Tim Walker gave it five stars. “Howard Davies cracking production… superbly funny… transforms triviality into comic perfection”. Tim called it “excruciatingly funny”. Michael Billington wrote in The Guardian, “it helps that he has a cast that could, as Coward said of his own 1964 revival, play the Albanian telephone directory”.

Led by the sublime Lindsay Duncan as Judith Bliss, the stellar cast included Kevin McNally as her testy and bookish husband, who’s “wearing a bit thin now” and the delightful Olivia Colman as the predatory vamp Myra Arundel.

This is one of a series of sketches I drew based on the production which both Olivia and Kevin signed in May 2012. The latest revival with Felicity Kendal opened this week at the Duke of York’s theatre in London, so I know what I’ll be drawing this week.

Drawing: Freddie Fox in Hay Fever

Posted on June 28, 2014 by Mark Winter / Chicane

The latest West End revival of Noel Coward’s comic play Hay Fever was staged, appropriately, at the Noel Coward Theatre in 2012. A cross between high farce and a comedy of manners, it is set in an English country house in the 1920s and deals with the four eccentric members of the Bliss family, and their outlandish behaviour. “Crisp comic bliss,” one critic wrote.

Frederic Samson Robert Morie Fox, thankfully abbreviated his name to Freddie, played Simon Bliss the son who was superbly resolute in his refusal to grow up. From the famous family of Foxes, Freddie definitely has the acting gene. The Observers Kate Kellaway described Freddie as, “deliciously debonair… a thespian treat, slightly teasing formality with poised charm.” He was certainly all that when he signed this sketch, after a summer evening’s performance in May 2012.