Christine Baranski will make her West End debut alongside Richard E. Grant in Hay Fever | stage

Christine Baranski is set to make her West End debut alongside Richard E. Grant in a revival of Noël Coward’s comedy Hay Fever. The American star, known for TV roles in The Good Fight and The Gilded Age, says she is looking forward to “tearing her passion to tatters” in the 1925 play about a family playing with their guests at a country house party.

The role will be played by recently retired actress Judith Bliss, with Grant playing her novelist husband. Baranski has twice won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play – with the 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 – best known for her recent productions of the Royal Shakespeare Company – Hay Fever will be running at Wyndham’s Theater from September 22nd to December 12th. Further casting has not been announced yet.

Baranski said she attended her first West End play in 1971 while a student at Juilliard: “So it’s a dream come true… I’m looking forward to life in London, a city I absolutely adore.” She described Grant as “intelligent and very funny” and called the play “a 101-year-old comedy of appalling manners” that required “quick delivery and gentle brilliance.”

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 happy to return to its stage “and perhaps a bigger dressing room” at Hay Fever. This marks a long-awaited high-profile return to the stage for Grant, who has recently been seen in supporting roles in films The Thursday Murder Club, 100 Nights of Hero, and as British Conservative MP David Maxwell Fyfe, in 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 premiered at the Noël Coward Theater in 2012, Lindsay Duncan played Judith, Kevin R McNally was her husband, and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who soon took Fleabag to the outskirts of Edinburgh, played their daughter.

The past few months have seen a rush of revivals of Coward’s works, including Fallen Angels at the Menier Chocolate Factory in London, Easy Virtue at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, his early play The Rat Trap at the Park Theater in London, and two different Manchester productions of Private Lives.