Joanna Pazucha

“There's a distinct lack of testosterone in the men,” quipped an audience member to his partner during the interval of Handel’s opera Ottone. It was hard to disagree.

‘A plotless play’ is the perfect description of Noel Coward’s Hayfever – a comedy written in three days with no revisions back in 1924.

With the musical My Fair Lady having largely overtaken Pygmalion in people’s minds when they think of Eliza Doolittle and Henry Higgins, it was interesting to see where the story began – with George Bernard Shaw’s 1914 play.