BLITHE SPIRIT

Dates

Informal Social Read Through: 17 February from 8pm
Auditions: 24 February from 8pm
Production Dates: 15, 16, and 17 May 2003.

Cast

Directed by Bernard Godwin.
Produced by Aaron Shakespeare.

Production Team

Summary

Blithe Spirit was written as W.W.II was breaking out and became one of Noel Coward's most successful comedies and has enjoyed many revivals, not least by the Magdalene Players whose 1987 production is unforgettable to those who took part.

Charles Condomine, an author whose first wife Elvira has been dead for seven years, has been reasonably happy with his second wife Ruth. To collect material for his new book, he invites Madame Arcati, a local medium, to conduct a seance at their home. Unfortunately, Elvira returns from death and promptly succeeds in making life exceedingly uncomfortable for Charles, he has great difficulty in persuading Ruth that he is neither mad nor drunk. Elvira is wilfully determined to get Charles for herself forever and so arranges several 'accidents', culminating by tampering with the car. Ironically, it is Ruth who drives first and joins her rival. Now plagued by two jealous squabbling spirits, Charles enlists the help of Madame Arcati, who finally disembodies the spirits but cannot quite exorcise them. Charles bids them farewell, saying he will escape forever by putting water between himself and his two wives who are left petulantly tearing the house apart.

A Note About Noel Coward

Prepared by Bernard Godwin.

Noel Coward, perhaps the most prolific and uniformly successful of the English dramatists between the two World Wars was more than a dramatist, he was a home de theatre of great versatility, being author, dramatist, actor, producer, director, cinema director and composer. Born in Teddington on 16th December 1899 and christened Noel Pierce, for no better reason than Christmas was imminent, he was encouraged by his mother to follow a stage career.

Education at Chapel Road School in Clapham, where the family had moved, was basic and Coward was largely self-taught. His first visit to the theatre was a performance of Sinbad at Kingston where he had to be taken out. However his next visit was more successful. It was to the Milkmaid which, he later recounted, involved a good deal of churning.

Coward first came to prominence with a piece that was, for the generation of the 1820's, what thirty years later John Osbourne's Look Back in Anger was to be for the late 1950's. The play was The Vortex, which Coward not only wrote but starred in. It was a society drama treating what, for its time, was strong subject matter - promiscuity and drug addiction. At a time when every stage play was vetted by the Lord Chamberlain, the Vortex, which opened at Hampstead, made the twenty four year old Coward a celebrity, proving his skill as both actor and author. Coward's output was prolific. Between the opening of The Vortex in 1924 and 1939 he wrote some thirty plays and musicals together with dozens of songs and revue sketches. Hay Fever (1925) established the type of comedy which was to become Coward's trademark. By the time Bitter Sweet opened in 1929 he was a superstar and it seemed that the whole country was singing I'll See You Again. In New York tickets were changing hands for $150. Private Lives (1930) arguably marked the pinnacle of the thirty year old Coward's career. Written for Gertrude Lawrence, whose voice was not strong enough to take the lead in Bitter Sweet, and, of course, Coward himself it tells the tale of a divorced couple who after remarrying meet on their honeymoons and fall in love all over again.

Although Coward's record in the Artist's Rifles during the Great War was one he was reticent about in later life, he was a patriot, having a deep love for England and the Empire. He became the embodiment of national pride during the 30's and 40's. At the height of his powers he conceived and produced one of the most spectacular and unashamedly patriotic extravaganzas ever seen on the London stage - Cavalcade (1931) was the story of Britain from the Boar War until 1929. It was unique amongst his plays in its dependence on visual (a cast of four hundred) rather than verbal seduction. Today dated, at the time it expressed the feelings and desires of a nation suffering the effects of the great depression. In 1938 Tonight at Eight Thirty appeared - a collection of short plays which included Still Life, later to be adapted into Brief Encounter (1945), one of the most celebrated films of the British cinema and one which confirmed Celia Johnson's reputation and made Trevor Howard a star.

In 1939, with the threat of war looming, Coward wrote two contrasting plays, This Happy Breed and Present Laughter. Rehearsals were under way when war was declared in September. The productions were cancelled and Coward left for Paris to undertake propaganda activities for the British Government. Undoubtedly it was his strong patriotism which took him to France but the mission was not a success so he went, at his own expense, to America to foster support for Britain there. Fuelled by the British press and in particular by Lord Beaverbrook, who had been his enemy for many years, this absence from a country at war did great harm to his reputation.

Returning to England Coward set about doing what he did best - to entertain. The first production of Blithe Spirit opened at the Opera House, Manchester on 16th June and in London on 2nd July at the Piccadilly Theatre with a cast that included Fay Compton, Kay Hammond, Cecil Parker and Margaret Rutherford. In his autobiography, Future Indefinite, Coward says that he completed Blithe Spirit in six days: "When the right note is struck and the structure of a play is carefully built in advance, it is both wise and profitable to start at the beginning and write through to the end in as short a time as possible". Coward had indeed struck the right note. The play ran for a record setting four and one-half years (1,997 performances). Perhaps the play represented Coward's gift to a war-weary nation. On opening night the audience walked across planks laid over the debris from a recent air raid to enter the fanciful ghost-ridden world that Coward had created, a world he himself said was "on a plane just above reality".

The sinking of H.M.S. Kelly, captained by his old friend Earl Mountbatten, gave Coward the idea for a film which would give a boost to the Royal Navy.In Which We Serve was the tale of a ship, her crew and their families. Coward played her captain, a thinly di sguised Mountbatten, with a stiff upper lip, which was essential Coward. Greeted with great acclaim it was the most successful film of 1943. This was followed by a twenty eight week tour of Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter and This Happy Breed after which he continued his support of the war effort entertaining troops in Australia, South Africa and, at Mountbatten's request the forgotten army in Assam and Burma.

The post war years saw the eclipse of Noel Coward's star. His style had become outdated and although there many who would still flock to see his plays, these now lacked the ability to shock and surprise as they had done in the 20's and 30's. An attempt to recapture the triumph of Cavalcade failed in Pacific 1960, which was set in sunshine but died in the cold and unheated post war Drury Lane. In 1951 Relative Values was a reminder of former flair but the successes of Bitter Sweet, Private Lives, Blithe Spirit were over.

Entertaining the troops proved a valuable experience when in later years London found a new cabaret star in Coward. Short of cash, he accepted an offer from the Cafe de Paris to appear for £750 a week. Everyone, including royalty, who was anyone, flocked to see him. It was the start of regular seasons, which continued until 1954. In 1955 he was engaged to play a season in Las Vegas for $35,000 a week. At last it seemed that he would be able to enjoy a comfortable old age. For in spite of his huge success, a combination of bad advice and the Inland Revenue had left him financially insecure. By now resident in Jamaica and Switzerland he found that it was in America that his audience lay. British tax regulations curtailed his visits home so he was unable to appear or produce many of his later plays. However in 1966 he triumphed with Suite in Three Keys, a collection of plays which included A Song at Twilight in which, for the first time, Coward's sexual preferences emerged into the flashlight of the sixties.

Although preferring the theatre to the chore of film making, Coward found that he could make money with relatively little effort by taking small parts in films such as Around the World in Eight Days and his last film, The Italian Job, which he made in 1968.

In 1970 Coward was feted on his 70th birthday, at long last receiving official recognition, being knighted. He died in Jamaica on 26th March 1973.

There is, no doubt, some truth in the charge that Coward wrote too much and too fast, was anxious to capitalise on his early success and that he frequently sacrificed quality for quick financial returns. But given the degree and range of his success, the length of time he worked in the theatre, the number of plays still holding a place in the repertory is impressive, he was known as "The Master" - to many he still is.