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. 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 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, and at last Madame Arcati succeeds. 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. Charles leaves at once, and the unseen ghosts throw things and destroy the room as soon as he has gone.
Cast:
Ruth – Janie Dee
Charles – Charles Edwards
Dr. Bradman – Simon Jones
Mrs. Bradman – Serena Evans
Madame Artcarti – Angela Lansbury
Elvira – Jemima Roper
Creative Team:
Written by: Noel Coward
Director : Michael Blakemore
Designer – Simon Higlett
Lighting – Mark Jonathan
Wardrobe – Traipsy Drake (what a name!)
Working in the back of beyond and living in the burbs, I
don’t often get into Central London on a
Friday night. Which is probably just as
well, as I don’t think I could stand it.
Readers, it was chaos. Pavements
outside every pub were practically impassable, lost tourists stopped in the
middle of the path and consulted maps, couples canoodled and dawdled and wrapped
their tongues round each others tonsils, idiots looking at mobile phones and
iPads wandered aimlessly from one side
of the pavement to the other with eyes fixed on their gadgets, rickshaws
trundled along, vans tried to reverse round corners, pedestrians drifted across
the road willy-nilly, police sirens wailed and from every doorway in Chinatown
came the clang of a different radio station..
At several points on the walk from Charing Cross
to Shaftesbury Avenue Shaftesbury Avenue 50 yards , eventually
managing to save myself by clinging to a tree and waiting until the flow had
subsided. Dazed, hot and bewildered I
staggered into the foyer resembling Robinson Crusoe washed up on the beach.
Even then I thought that the wildlife had followed me through the door as an
incredibly sour faced chap wearing
trousers of the loudest shade of emerald green I have ever seen waddled by,
leaving me briefly wondering if I was being stalked by a mallard with a face
like a slapped arse. Just by my elbow a
woman practically screamed to her companion “Do you want coffee or champagne in
the interval?” Personally, I thought, I
could do with a couple of valium and a swig of Rescue Remedy if she was
offering, but she didn’t. So was it all
worth it? Of course it was. Angela Lansbury could have stood on the stage
and read from the telephone directory and it would have been worth it.
On the face of it, Blithe Spirit is a strange animal to be
inhabiting the West End . It’s a gentle, amusing play without flash or dash,
wasn’t written by Lloyd Webber, isn’t based on a 1980s film and doesn’t feature
animatronic sets that would make Alton
Towers
Of the assembled cast, only Jemima Rooper’s Elvira really fails
to shine. Her Elvira is not quite classy
enough to have been married to Charles Condomine, a little too earthy and a
little too earthbound. I wasn’t terribly
impressed with the fact that there was no apparent effort to give her an
appropriately ghostly pallor – not only has Elvira been dead for seven years,
but she was recovering from the flu at the time of her death, so a touch of
pale makeup would have been appropriate.
The only time she looked really ghostly was whenever she stood in a
particular spot down stage left where the lighting seemed particularly pale, in
contrast to the warmly lit remainder of the stage. The fact that Ms. Rooper is dark-haired
underneath her white wig is unfortunately evidenced by her very dark eyebrows,
making her look a little badgerish. She
is totally outclassed on the stage by
Janie Dee’s Ruth, looking considerably better coiffed and attired than the last
time I saw her. In fact, if I hadn’t
been told she was Janie Dee, I wouldn’t have recognised her. Charles Edward’s Charles is a perfect
rendition of a part that must be very tempting to over-do. I would imagine that there is a temptation to
make him rather louche and brittle, in the manner of Coward himself. Apparently Rupert Everett played the role on
Broadway before this production transferred to London
They are, of course, only there as padding to support Angela
Lansbury, whom everyone has come to see.
I tell you, you wouldn’t know the woman was well into her 80s. Despite playing the part of Madame Arcarti as
much younger than she is herself, Lansbury rarely, if ever, shows any that she
is not physically up to the role. There
were a couple of wobbles with the dialogue – several times you can see she is
fumbling to remember the exact words, and one major clanger dropped when she
gave the date of Daphne’s death (Daphne being her spirit guide) as 1994 rather
than 1884 – but the woman is a natural comedian both physically and verbally
and oozes class from every pore. She
wisely avoids making her Madame Arcarti over-hearty in the style of Margaret
Rutherford, and brings a certain wistful common sense to the role, although she
is perhaps a little too frail physically for the audience to believe that she
has cycled 8 miles
to the Condomine’s house (although, again, this was a tiny slip; in the script,
its 7 miles ). At times, there is more than a touch of the
Salome Otterbourne about her portrayal,
but who cares? It’s a stunning
performance, full of lovely deft touches of comedy timing I admit that I did get slightly annoyed with
the audience’s tendency to applaud her every entrance and exit, and wonder
whether she deliberately “wrong footed” the audience at one point by exiting in
her final scene and then suddenly popping back onto the stage halfway through
the applause with an interpolated line (not in the original script) about
wanting another cucumber sandwich.
The nit picker in me noticed quite a few slip ups in terms
of the stage design. In the first scene we hear a cuckoo calling outside the
French windows (and this is commented on in the script), which would make the
action set no later than the end of May, and yet one of the flower vases
contains a sunflower, a species which doesn’t bloom until late July at the
earliest. There are two vases of flowers
on stage during Act 1, both of which remain untouched and unchanged as the
curtain rises on Act 2 and yet in Act 2, scene 1, (set the next day), Ruth
mentions having done the flowers that morning.
Edith is supposed to bring in a tray of bacon, eggs and toast for
breakfast (all of which are referred to in the dialogue), but the toast rack
holds only slices of raw bread. Yes,
yes, I know.
A wonderful evening’s entertainment, well played and
excellently cast. But the entire show
rightly belongs to Lansbury who takes the audience in the palm of her hand and
walks away with their hearts and minds, for which she rightly and justifiably
received a standing ovation at the final curtain. One final note of approval – there was none
of this “communist bowing” that Him Indoors loathes and always comments on;
Edith the maid takes a solo bow, followed by the Bradmans, then by Ruth and
Elvira, then by Charles and finally Madame Arcarti, giving the audience the
opportunity to show their appreciation by rising from their seats as a single
unit and giving Lansbury the ovation she deserves.
Blythe Spirit officially opens tomorrow - I will post up some reviews, and hopefully a youtube video later in the week.
