Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Noël Coward. The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance,
hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when
he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife,
Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt
Charles's marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the
ghost.
The play was first seen in London's West End in 1941, creating a new long-run record for non-musical British plays of 1,997 performances. It also did well on Broadway later that year, running for 657 performances. Coward adapted the play for film in 1945, starring Rex Harrison, and directed a musical adaptation, High Spirits,
on Broadway in 1964. It was also adapted for television in the 1950s
and 1960s and for radio. The play enjoyed several West End and Broadway
revivals in the 1970s and 1980s and was revived again in London in 2004,
2011 and 2014. It returned to Broadway in February 2009.
The title of the play is taken from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark", ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert"). For some time before 1941 Coward had been thinking of a comedy about
ghosts. His first thoughts centered on an old house in Paris, haunted by
specters from different centuries, with the comedy arising from their
conflicting attitudes, but he could not get the plot to work in his
mind. He knew that in wartime Britain, with death a constant presence, there would be some objection to a comedy about ghosts, but his firm view was that as the story would be thoroughly heartless, "you can't sympathize with any of them. If there was a heart it would be a sad story."
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.
Synopsis:
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. Madame Arcati leaves after the séance, unaware that she
has summoned Elvira. 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 louche 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 materializes 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
dematerializing 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.[ 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.)
Link to the review by The Morning Call here
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