Blithe Spirit: (Modern Plays)

We've stood up - we've lain down - we've concentrated. We've sat interminably while that tiresome old woman recited extremely unflattering verses at us. We're endured five séances - we've watched her fling herself in and out of trances until we're dizzy, and at the end of it all we find ourselves exactly where we were at the beginning. Researching for his new novel, Charles Condomine invites the implausible medium Madame Arcati to his house for a séance. Whilst consumed in a trance, Madame Arcati unwittingly summons the ghost of Charles's dead wife, Elvira. Appearing only to Charles, Elvira soon makes a play to reclaim her husband, much to the chagrin of Charles's new wife, Ruth. One husband, two feuding wives and a whisper of mischief in the air - who will win in Coward's unworldly comedy? Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in the history of the British theatre for three decades thereafter. Dealing with relationships on both sides of the grave, it is an enduring classic. A new edition of Coward's classic play published to coincide with the 2014 new West End revival at the Gielgud Theatre, starring Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati.

Table of Contents:
Play text

About the Author :
Noël Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex. He made his name as a playwright with The Vortex (1924), in which he also appeared. His numerous other successful plays included Fallen Angels (1925), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1933), Design for Living (1933) and Blithe Spirit (1941). During the war he wrote screenplays such as Brief Encounter (1944) and In Which We Serve (1942). In the fifties he began a new career as a cabaret entertainer. He published volumes of verse and a novel (Pomp and Circumstance, 1960), two volumes of autobiography and four volumes of short stories: To Step Aside (1939), Star Quality (1951), Pretty Polly Barlow (1964) and Bon Voyage (1967). He was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica.

Review :
The wide-set eyes flash, the fingers fly like knitting needles, the teeth bulge and the cheeks quiver to comic effect. It is like being in a pre-war Lagonda and watching the old dashboard dials dance into life. This play . . . holds up well when played in a properly blithe spirit. . . . one of Noel Coward's most inventive comedies . . . It is a comedy that still startles and delights. Coward wrote it in the darkest days of the Second World War and in the circumstances its determinedly frivolous attitude to morality seems downright heroic. As Coward liked to say, what's so wrong with mere entertainment? . . . Noel Coward's eternal comedy classic.