Hay Fever

Gate Theatre, Dublin Previews until Aug 1 20 Opens Aug 2-Sep 24 7.30pm (Sat mat 2.30pm) 25-35 (15 student) 01-8744045 gatetheatre.com

Long before David Brooks coined the term, Noël Coward may have discovered the “bobo” – the “bourgeois bohemian” – in its natural habitat, supping from the well of creative industry, commanding all attention, returning very little. Coward’s study was the appropriately named Bliss family, a unit of talented but trivial people.

“It’s Father and Mother’s fault, really,” explains Sorel, daughter of a novelist and actress. “They’ve spent their lives cultivating their arts and not devoting any time to ordinary conventions and manners.”

In 1925, Coward rather approved of such eccentricity, which helped him construct a self-consciously artificial comedy of ill manners and social embarrassment, in which each family member invites an unwitting houseguest, without informing anyone else.

Coward himself has become a curiously regular visitor to the Gate, which has produced several of his comedies without worrying about their sell-by date. “They are written in the most topical and perishable way imaginable,” said critic Cyril Connolly. “The cream in them turns sour overnight.”

So it’s up to the sure-handed director Patrick Mason and his ridiculously promising cast (Ingrid Craigie, left, Stephen Brennan, Beth Cooke, Marty Rea) to make some fresh associations. They may be found in the contemporary alarm of a realisation made by the Blisses’ disoriented guests: They are celebrities . . . get us out of here!

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TranslationsAbbey, Dublin