Blithe Spirit
by Noel Coward
State Theatre South Australia
Optima Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
It is a strange shift from the contemporary theatrical idiom of Festival
productions like Iets op Bach, Ur/faust and Cortese’s Roulette to the stagey drawing room manners of Blithe Spirit. This is not to say that Noel Coward’s other-worldly comedy, written in six days in May, 1941 and performed in London nearly two thousand times from 1941 to 1946 is not worth the revival. But it is a play whose style, attitudes and values are further removed than forty years suggests.
Noel Coward’s plays, elegantly and deftly crafted, are as brisk and dry as the martinis they so frequently celebrate. But what is it that we value about them now ? Unlike the first London audience who watched its cool wit in a theatre half-blitzed in an air raid, we have no heightened sense of its insouciance, or of the careless view towards sudden and untimely death.
The country house with its young sophisticate owners and dullard servants with bumpkin accents has, for us, been replaced by glamour fantasies of American urban elites. We still have a preoccupation with the pitfalls of relationships both in and out of wedlock but strangely it is more likely to be the suburban anxiety of Seinfeld and Cold Feet, or the sappy comedy of Harry meeting Sally than the caddish behaviour of Noel Coward’s sardonic chaps and their consorts.
In the first State Theatre production for the year, director Rosalba Clemente has
reconstructed the period of Coward’s play. Robert Kemp’s drawing room set with its angular sides, vanishing into high French doors is fetchingly detailed and handsomely lit by Mark Shelton who also manages the spooky special effects, including the spectral figure of Elvira, the late wife of Charles Condomine now married to his new partner, Ruth.
For all its madcap comedy on seances and the peculiar antics of spiritual mediums Blithe Spirit deals with the less laughable matter of jealousy over previous affections. Charles is by no means resolved about the departure of his first wife, as the demanding Elvira demonstrates to the increasingly flustered Ruth. He is fast becoming, as Coward wittliy puts it, an astral bigamist and, it seems, there is little he is prepared to do about it.
In the lead roles, Deborah Kennedy is self-possessed and astute as Ruth while Andrew Tighe, usually reliable, is a somewhat buffoonish Charles. As Elvira, Amanda Muggleton is almost alarmingly determined to prevail. As the Bradmans, stodgy observers of the unfolding events, Patrick Frost and Kathryn Dean, serve well, as does Caroline Mignone despite an inclination to turn the maid Edith into a version of Frank Spencer.
But the liveliest performance, deliciously, if whimsically, written by Coward, is Kerry Walker’s Madame Arcati, the medium who conjures more than she can manage. Walker has a freshness and playfulness which lifts the production considerably and offsets the tendency to render lines like elocution lessons.
With this production Rosalba Clemente has given us a well-realised and entertaining account of Coward’s play which is, like much of his work, actually as facile as it appears. There is no subtext waiting to be revealed, as in say Rattigan or Priestley’s An Inspector Calls. Rather, there is a curious mix of conventional boulevard comedy and a cruel disdain for his characters.
Coward is witty about marriage because he is indifferent to it, not because he has insights into the complexity of relationship. The women in Blithe Spirit are readily despatched – Elvira has a fatal attack of the BBC light entertainment program, Ruth goes for a burton in her car- and Charles appears to echo the playwright when he announces himself well rid of them both. Perhaps for that reason I prefer the ending in David Lean’s 1945 film version to the poltergeist rattling conclusion to the stage version. At least there is a sense that Charles is a less privileged figure in this menage when he is catapulted to the Other Side to join them.
The Adelaide Review, May 2000.