Theatre for the upper-classes?

I went to see the Noel Coward play Hay Fever at the Noel Coward this week, and can't say I particularly enjoyed it. It got a couple of laughs out of me, and has a good comic scene at the end where the four guests to the family's home try to escape without being noticed a day before they are due to leave, but overall I felt it relied too much on the public's inkling to laugh at a hyperbolic shambolic upper-middle-class.

It kind of grated on me, and after Terence Rattigan's centenary productions across the West End last year, it got me thinking why it is these plays are seen as candidates for reproduction in the current social climate, which seems to me quite anti-upper-class. (Maybe I just speak to the right people.) Is it because successful playwrights of the first half of the 20th century tended to focus on these characters rather than those occupying different places in society? Write what you know after all. By all accounts, Coward had a modest upbringing, but from an outsider's perspective, and from watching plays like Hay Fever, it seems writing for the stage used to be a hobby of the privileged, or it was demanded by audiences that it appeared that way.

It still begs the question of why they are being revived and revisited in theatres across the country in 2012. Is theatre-going still an upper-class pursuit? I'd like to think not. Then again, I got a free ticket.