Seven Oaks Magazine.

Apparently, in this life, there are those who relate to highbrow British playwright Noel Coward on the one hand, and those who relate to thick-browed Russian anarchist Mikhail Bakunin on the other. I made the mistake of offering my extra ticket to Nicola Cavendish’s current staging of Coward’s play Hayfever – running until January 28th at North Vancouver’s Performance House Theatre – to a dear friend, devoted anarchist and biographer of Bakunin who shall remain nameless; his anonymity an echo of the faceless terror that Bakunin’s anarchism shot through the European bourgeoisie and authoritarian Marxist movements alike. Since most British people (in my understanding) are either bourgeois or authoritarian Marxists, Coward really didn’t have a chance.

It didn’t help that the affluent, blue-rinse North Vancouver audience was eating up Hayfever’s cucumber sandwich of theatricality with a silver spoon. Watching the aristocratic tea-swillers in the crowd sympathetically imbibing the aristocratic bohemian rejoinders that make up Coward’s script was like watching the play in 3-D glasses. They laughed uproariously whenever the onstage family’s maid was impudent (they somehow managed to recognize her capturing of the essence of domestic help even though she wasn’t Filipina), and at one point, the man sitting next to me (to my left, as it turned out) nearly wet himself after hearing the lines “‘Do they have tea here?’ ‘They must!’”

Throughout this, my Bakuninist companion shot me exasperated sidelong glances, having already exhausted the evening’s potential for politically ironic enjoyment by having treated me to dinner in a North Vancouver Schnitzel house with photos of Kaiser Wilhelm on the wall. For the first twenty minutes, I looked back and smiled, laughed embarrassedly, and jokingly apologized for having brought him along. After that, I apologized sincerely. And after that, I promised him that we could leave at intermission.

I’m told, by a friend and fellow reviewer who took his mom to the play instead of an anarcho-syndicalist, that the second act was superb. He wrote the following to me, in an e-mail response to the explanation I had offered for my early exit: “I can't believe you two prols had the gall to be so gauche. My mother and I enjoyed ourselves to the utmost--and, yes, there was a surprise in the second act--the audience offered a spontaneous devotional blood-letting to the spirit of Noel Coward and bathed the actors in our blue juices.”

My sincere apologies to Ms. Cavendish, whose performance in Blowin’ on Bowen, years ago at Granville Island, helped to inspire a life-long love of comic theatre in the young me. I truly wanted to feel comfortable enjoying your new production but – with Bakunin or without – as someone earning less than ten grand a year, the whole place gave me the creeps. But if you’re ever directing something in East Van, I’ll be there on opening night.