US actress Christine Baranski has said it will be a “dream come true” to make her West End debut later this year, in a new production of Noel Coward’s comedy Hay Fever.
The star, best known for Mamma Mia! and legal drama The Good Wife, will appear in the new adaptation opposite Richard E Grant, producers announced on Friday.
Baranski, 73, told BBC News it felt “extraordinary” to be coming to the West End at this stage of her career.
“It’s been on my bucket list for years,” she said. “It’s going to be just wonderful, I can’t tell you how excited I am. Believe me, I’m already studying the role, learning my lines, and working to polish an English accent.”
The show will run for 12 weeks at the Wyndham’s Theatre in London from 22 September.
Speaking to the BBC from New York, Baranski said she had been pining to return to her theatre roots for some time.
“The problem has always been my filming schedule,” she explained, “which has not allowed me to carve out enough time to do a play, but if ever there was a play for me to do, it would be this one.
“The skill set involved is so to my liking – dusting off my light comedy skills and doing it with an ensemble cast of actors who are keen to revive Coward in that way.”
Grant said he was “delighted” to be returning to the West End after a two-decade gap, and described his co-star Baranski as “sensational”.
“Hay Fever premiered in the West End 101 years ago (but who’s counting?),” he joked in a statement. “I love the theatre and am thrilled to return to it.”
Getty ImagesDespite being better known in recent years for Abba musicals and TV dramas, Baranski noted she started out as “predominantly a theatre actress” and initially had “no desire to be a television actor”.
But, she recalled, her career “took something of a U-turn” in her early 40s when she was cast in US 1990s sitcom Cybill, starring Cybill Shepherd.
“That really transformed my career, and suddenly I was offered wonderful movie roles,” Baranski said. “So to my astonishment, the latter part of my career has been film and mostly television.”
The actress received six Emmy Award nominations for her role as Diane Lockhart in The Good Wife, and went on to star in spin-off The Good Fight.
She has also appeared in Chicago, Nine Perfect Strangers, Frasier, The Big Bang Theory, and is currently in HBO period drama The Gilded Age.
“This is the first opportunity where it’s clear I have an opening where I will finish The Gilded Age in mid-August, and go into rehearsal for Hay Fever a few days later,” she said.
Play inspired by ‘rude’ actress
Hay Fever is one of Coward’s most enduring comedies, and follows the self-centred Bliss family – retired actress Judith, her novelist husband David, and their children Sorel and Simon.
All four separately invite a guest to stay for the weekend without telling the other family members, setting the scene for a weekend of chaos.
The lead female character has often been played by a British actress – Felicity Kendal took on the role for the show’s last West End incarnation in 2015.
It’s more unusual for a US actress to play the part, but Coward actually based the character on an American he’d met at a dinner party in 1921.
The playwright was fascinated by Broadway star Laurette Taylor and her abrupt manner with house guests, and based Hay Fever on her family.
“It’s the most delightful story,” said Baranski of the Taylor connection. “She had a husband named Hartley Manners, and they were so bohemian and so rude.
“Laurette Taylor was a famous and brilliant American actress, and Noel Coward renamed them Hardly Manners,” she laughed.
“He was captivated by their rudeness, and he called this play a comedy of appalling manners.”
Taylor, who died in 1946, somewhat distanced herself from the portrayal when she saw the show, famously remarking: “None of us is ever unintentionally rude.”
Heritage Images via GettyBaranski has previously appeared in several other Coward plays, such as Fumed Oak, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit. “So I’m something of a Cowardian,” she joked.
“I just love the quicksilver delivery and suave flamboyance of Coward, it’s delightful to play.”
The actress suggested the enduring popularity of classical plays in the West End and Broadway is down to the dialogue, something she “loves sinking my teeth into”.
“Classical plays give you language, the ability to speak it and to give a kind of spin to a sentence that you don’t have with modern playwriting,” she said.
Grant shot to fame in 1987’s Withnail & I, and has more recently appeared in Saltburn, Nuremberg and The Thursday Murder Club.
He and Baranski don’t know each other well, but recently met via Zoom. “I was utterly captivated by him,” Baranski said. “He’s whip smart, wickedly funny.”
Emily Burns will direct the new adaptation of Hay Fever, which is being produced by Wessex Grove and Gavin Kalin Productions.
