Christine Baranski to make West End debut alongside Richard E Grant in Hay Fever

Christine Baranski is to make her West End debut alongside Richard E Grant in a revival of Noël Coward’s comedy Hay Fever. The US star, known for her TV roles in The Good Fight and The Gilded Age, says she is looking forward to “tearing a passion to tatters” in the 1925 play about a family toying with their guests at a country house party.She will star as the newly retired actor Judith Bliss, with Grant playing her novelist husband. Baranski has twice won the Tony award for best featured actress in a play – with New York productions of Tom Stoppard’s The Real Thing in 1984 and Neil Simon’s Rumors in 1989. She also appeared in the comedies Hurlyburly (in 1985) and Boeing-Boeing (in 2008) on Broadway.Directed by Emily Burns – who has been acclaimed for her recent Royal Shakespeare Company productions – Hay Fever will run at Wyndham’s theatre from 22 September to 12 December. Further casting is yet to be announced.Baranski said she attended her first West End play in 1971 when she was a student at Juilliard: “So it’s rather a dream come true … I look forward to a life in London, a city I absolutely adore.” She called Grant “whip-smart and wickedly funny” and described the play as a “101-year-old comedy of appalling manners” that requires “quicksilver delivery and suave flamboyance”.Grant said it had been 25 years since he guest-starred for a night in The Play What I Wrote at Wyndham’s and that he was delighted to return to its stage “and maybe to a bigger dressing room” in Hay Fever. It marks a long-awaited, high-profile return to the theatre for Grant, recently seen in supporting roles in the films The Thursday Murder Club, 100 Nights of Hero and, as the British Tory MP David Maxwell Fyfe, Nuremberg. In 2005 he had the lead role as a publisher in Simon Gray’s play Otherwise Engaged at the Criterion theatre.When Hay Fever was staged at the Noël Coward theatre in 2012, Lindsay Duncan had the role of Judith, Kevin R McNally was her husband and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, soon to take Fleabag to the Edinburgh fringe, played their daughter.The last few months have seen a rush of Coward revivals including Fallen Angels at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, Easy Virtue at Cambridge’s Arts theatre, his early play The Rat Trap at Park theatre in London and two different Manchester productions of Private Lives.