Contempt for Truth

The Bliss's blatant disregard for reality is contrasted with the more dangerous and insidious contempt for truth involved in their guest's conventional attitudes. "I do hope you meant that," Judith sweetly inquires of Richard who has been assuring her of the continuance of her charms. Myra, the son's guest, disparages the Bliss's non-observance of forms; "It's useless to wait for introductions with the Blisses..." but, after correctly introducing herself, makes no attempt to get to know anyone.

The guests are divided into those who are simply bewildered and those who attempt to resist the Bliss's fantastic regime. Sandy, the boxer, and Jackie, the flapper, soon lapse into ignominious incomprehension. Richard is less easy to place; Paul Gittins plays him as a gauche diplomat whose fatuousness has him in the nonplussed camp, but it might have given the play a better balance if, at least initially, he had interpretted the part more strongly - setting Richard's slick diplomacy against the exuberance of his hosts. Myra does not capitulate so readily, condemning the Blisses in the hectic closing scene of Act 2 as, "posing, self-centred egotists."

This climactic scene, in which even Myra's resistance is finally broken down, is the finest thing in the play. It is the utterly right culmination to the masterly heightening of tension in this Act: the game of adverbs with Its merging of reality and fantasy; the Monty Pythonesque comfy chair routine; and the final master stroke in which the Blisses, on Richard's unwitting cue line, switch alarmingly from reality to one of Judith's old melodramas, leaving the guests gasping at all manner of incestuous implications.

It would be nice then if Hay Fever could be tidily explained as an exultation of the Bliss's emancipation from the conventions which stifle their guests. Unfortunately it is not so simple - the Bliss's imaginings do not in fact point the way to a more important reality behind the conventional facade. Judith's melodramatic flights of fancy highlight the absurdity of correct behaviour not by breaking free from it but by ludicrously adhering to it.