SET in the front room of the Blisses’ family home by the Thames in the 1920s, Hay Fever is one of Noel Coward’s earliest hits and, according to actor Simon Callow, his first masterpiece.

It is sometimes claimed he wrote it in three days flat, but there’s probably an element of youthful boasting in the claim.

The Bliss family – fading actress Judith, successful penny dreadful novelist David and their two children – have each invited a guest to stay for the weekend. Each is almost equally mischievous and none has let the others know they’ve invited anybody.

So everything is ready for the country house weekend from hell, which duly and delightfully follows.

Kate Layden is wonderfully histrionic as Judith, clearly determined that, if she can’t get back to the real stage, she’ll use her house and guests as an alternative set and cast. She manages a passable pastiche of Marianne Faithfull singing “plaisir d’amour”.

Olivia Mace is alternatively sullen and deliciously vivacious as her daughter Sorel, who accurately sighs: “One always plays up to mother in this house – it’s a sort of unwritten law.”

Among the guests, Polly Lister is excellent as the husky would-be vamp Myra Arundel. One can easily agree when she is described as “using sex like a sort of shrimping net” but she’s no match for Peter Macqueen’s brusque and brisk David Bliss.

Heather Phoenix’s Clara, the surly maid, shines out. She responds to Judith’s languid line, “nudity can be a beautiful thing”, with the perfectly delivered and timed: “Perhaps me being a dresser has spoiled me eye for it”, while her laying out the breakfast table raised simple scene shifting on to a higher level.

It may not be the most profound play ever, but you’re unlikely to have a more frothily enjoyable evening’s theatre this side of Christmas.

Hay Fever is performed in rep at the Keswick theatre until November 7.

Alan Sykes