WE all need cheering up after the Budget’s bitter medicine and the World Cup farce.

“A Noel Coward has always seemed to me the perfect thing for a summer’s evening,” says Playhouse artistic director Ian Brown, in his programme notes to Hay Fever, his remedy to the blues.

This is Brown’s best production since…never mind how long, just make sure you see it on a summer’s evening before July 10.

Coward wrote his slight comedy of bad manners over a weekend in 1924, going on to judge it to be “far and away one of the most difficult plays to perform that I have encountered”. His advice was that its general effectiveness depends on expert technique from each and every member of the cast.

Brown’s cast is indeed uniformly splendid, but no less significant is his own exquisitely timed direction and the fabulous set and costume designs of Mike Britton.

Above the cluttered, casual interior of Bliss family’s bohemian house in the Cookham countryside is a relief of giant white roses against a perfect blue sky: very English, very over-the-top, very like the Bliss family.

Matriarch Judith Bliss (Maggie Steed), an actress never as great as her rampant ego, is bored with retired life in the country, unable to remember the names of flowers, and tiring of her self-absorbed children, Simon (Michael Benz) and Sorel (Alice Haig), as they nudge adulthood.

Husband David (Martin Turner) is upstairs writing his latest romantic novel book that he could pen in his sleep. All have invited a guest, without telling the others, to be the mouse to their cat to spice up the weekend.

The guests are indeed playthings for the ever open Blisses, but all turn out to have their own hypocritical motives to be caught up in the maelstrom of bad behaviour and unpredictable artistic temperament, from ever diplomatic diplomatist Richard Greatham (Philip Bretherton) to fluffy flapper Jackie Coryton (Emily Bowker), inscrutable socialite Myra Arundel (Emma Amos) to gullible Sandy Tyrell (Matthew Douglas).

Maggie Steed’s Judith is the fulcrum, and rather than an assured out-and-out monster, she plays her as someone no longer capable of knowing the distinction between fake and real in her own feelings: perhaps the ultimate destiny of a fading talent.

It is such nuances that give Brown’s witty production the richly rewarding content to go with the style. What bliss amid the blisters.

Hay Fever, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, until July 10. Box office: 0113 213 7700.