Blithe Spirit (play)

The title of the play is taken from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark", ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert").[1] For some time before 1941 Coward had been thinking of a comedy about ghosts. His first thoughts centred on an old house in Paris, haunted by spectres from different centuries, with the comedy arising from their conflicting attitudes, but he could not get the plot to work in his mind.[2] He knew that in wartime Britain, with death a constant presence, there would be some objection to a comedy about ghosts,[3] but his firm view was that as the story would be thoroughly heartless, "you can't sympathise with any of them. If there was a heart it would be a sad story."[2]

After his London office and flat had been destroyed in the Blitz, Coward took a short holiday with the actress Joyce Carey at Portmeirion on the coast of Snowdonia in Wales. She was writing a play about Keats, and he was still thinking about his ghostly light comedy:

We sat on the beach with our backs against the sea wall and discussed my idea exclusively for several hours. Keats, I regret to say, was not referred to. By lunchtime the title had emerged together with the names of the characters, and a rough, very rough, outline of the plot. At seven-thirty the next morning I sat, with the usual nervous palpitations, at my typewriter. Joyce was upstairs in her room wrestling with Fanny Brawne. There was a pile of virgin paper on my left and a box of carbons on my right. The table wobbled and I had to put a wedge under one of its legs. I smoked several cigarettes in rapid succession, staring gloomily out of the window at the tide running out. I fixed the paper into the machine and started. Blithe Spirit. A Light Comedy in Three Acts. For six days I worked from eight to one each morning and from two to seven each afternoon. On Friday evening, May ninth, the play was finished and, disdaining archness and false modesty, I will admit that I knew it was witty, I knew it was well constructed, and I also knew that it would be a success.[4]

Charles Condomine, a successful novelist, wishes to learn about the occult for a novel he is writing, and he arranges for an eccentric medium, Madame Arcati, to hold a séance at his house. At the séance, she inadvertently summons Charles's first wife, Elvira, who has been dead for seven years. The medium leaves, unaware of what she has done. Only Charles can see or hear Elvira, and his second wife, Ruth, does not believe that Elvira exists until a floating vase is handed to her out of thin air. Elvira is appealingly decadent, unconventional and moody, in contrast to the more strait-laced Ruth. The ghostly Elvira makes continued, and increasingly desperate, efforts to disrupt Charles's current marriage. She finally sabotages his car in the hope of killing him so that he will join her in the spirit world, but it is Ruth rather than Charles who drives off and is killed.

Ruth's ghost immediately comes back for revenge on Elvira, and though Charles cannot at first see Ruth, he can see that Elvira is being chased and tormented, and his house is in uproar. He calls Madame Arcati back to exorcise both of the spirits, but instead of banishing them she unintentionally materialises Ruth. With both his dead wives now fully visible, and neither of them in the best of tempers, Charles, together with Madame Arcati, goes through séance after séance and spell after spell to try to exorcise them. It is not until Madame Arcati works out that the housemaid, Edith, is psychic and had unwittingly been the conduit through which Elvira was summoned that she succeeds in dematerialising both ghosts. Charles is left seemingly in peace, but Madame Arcati, hinting that the ghosts may still be around unseen, warns him that he should go far away as soon as possible. Coward repeats one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of the play, where the central character tiptoes out as the curtain falls – a device that he also used in Present Laughter, Private Lives and Hay Fever.[5] Charles leaves at once, and the unseen ghosts throw things and destroy the room as soon as he has gone. (In the David Lean film version, the ghosts thwart Charles's attempt to escape, and his car is again sabotaged; he crashes and joins them as a ghost, with Elvira at one arm and Ruth at the other.)

The original West End cast was as follows:

• Charles Condomine – Cecil Parker
• Ruth Condomine, his second wife – Fay Compton
• Elvira Condomine, his first wife and ghostly presence – Kay Hammond
• Madame Arcati, a medium – Margaret Rutherford
• Doctor Bradman, a friend – Martin Lewis
• Mrs Bradman, his wife – Moya Nugent
• Edith, a maid – Ruth Reeves

The play was first produced at the Manchester Opera House in June 1941, and then premiered in the West End at the Piccadilly Theatre on 2 July 1941,[6] later transferring to the St James's Theatre and then the Duchess Theatre, for a total of 1,997 performances.[7][8] It was directed by Coward; sets and costumes were designed by Gladys Calthrop.[9] During the run Beryl Measor took over as Madame Arcati and Irene Browne took over the role of Ruth.[8] When the play transferred from the Piccadilly to the St James's in 1942, Coward took over the role of Charles for a time.[10] The run set a record for non-musical plays in the West End that was not surpassed until 1957 by The Mousetrap.[11]

The Broadway premiere was on 5 November 1941 at the Morosco Theatre in a production staged by John C. Wilson and designed by Stewart Chaney. In the cast were Clifton Webb as Charles, Peggy Wood as Ruth, Leonora Corbett as Elvira and Mildred Natwick as Madame Arcati. The play transferred to the Booth Theatre on 18 May 1942; it ran for a total of 657 performances.[12] Coward starred as Charles in a wartime UK touring company, beginning in September 1942, with Joyce Carey as Ruth, Judy Campbell as Elvira and Molly Johnson as Madame Arcati.[13] Dennis Price covered for Coward when the latter was taken ill.[14] Another wartime touring company, run by ENSA, toured the Far East in 1945, headed by John Gielgud, who directed, and played Charles.[15]

After the first performance in Manchester, the reviewer in The Manchester Guardian thought the mixture of farce and impending tragedy "An odd mixture and not untouched by genius of a sort".[32] After the London premiere, Ivor Brown commented in The Observer on the skill with which Coward had treated his potentially difficult subject; he ended his notice, "But here is a new play, a gay play, and one irresistibly propelled into our welcoming hearts by Miss Rutherford's Lady of the Trances, as rapt a servant of the séance as ever had spirits on tap."[33] The London correspondent of The Guardian wrote, "London received Mr Noel Coward's ghoulish farce with loud, though not quite unanimous acclaim. There was a solitary boo – from an annoyed spiritualist, presumably."[34] The Times considered the piece the equal not only of Coward's earlier success Hay Fever but of Wilde's classic comedy The Importance of Being Earnest.[35] There were dissenting views. James Agate thought the play "common",[36] and Graham Greene called it "a wearisome exhibition of bad taste".[37]

When the piece had its first West End revival in 1970 the play was warmly though not rapturously praised by the critics,[37][38] but by the time of the next major production, in 1976, Irving Wardle of The Times considered, "Stylistically, it is Coward's masterpiece: his most complete success in imposing his own view of things on the brute facts of existence,"[39] and Michael Billington of The Guardian wrote of Coward's influence on Harold Pinter.[17] In 2004, Charles Spencer of The Daily Telegraph wrote, "With Hay Fever and Private Lives, Blithe Spirit strikes me as being one of Coward 's three indisputable comic masterpieces. [It is] the outrageous frivolity with which Coward treats mortality that makes the piece so bracing."[40]

Note

References

• Citron, Stephen (2005). Noel & Cole: the Sophisticates. Milwaukee: Hal Leonard Corporation. ISBN 0634093029.
• Coward, Noël (1954). Future Indefinite. London: Heinemann. OCLC 5002107.
• Coward, Noël (1994). Plays, Four. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413461203.
• Day, Barry (2005). Coward on Film: The Cinema of Noël Coward. Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 0810853582.
• Hoare, Philip (1995). Noël Coward, A Biography. London: Sinclair-Stevenson. ISBN 1856192652.
• Lahr, John (1982). Coward the Playwright. London: Methuen. ISBN 041348050X.
• Lesley, Cole (1976). The Life of Noël Coward. London: Cape. ISBN 0224012886.
• Morley, Sheridan (2001). John G – The Authorised Biography of John Gielgud. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0340368039.
• Payn, Graham (1994). My Life with Noël Coward. New York: Applause Books. ISBN 1557831904.

• Internet Broadway Database listing
• Blithe Spirit at ThatTheatreSite Provides character listing, reviews of several productions, and current upcoming auditions.
• Blithe Spirit Provides links to reviews of the 2009 Broadway revival
• 1946 Theatre Guild on the Air radio adaptation of play at Internet Archive
• 1952 Best Plays radio adaptation of play at Internet Archive