BLITHE SPIRIT ★★★
Harold Pinter Theatre, London, until November 6. Tickets: 03330 096 690
While there are plenty of ghost plays whose sole intention is to give you the willies, Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit is lighter than air, carefree and diaphanous.
Novelist Charles Condomine (Geoffrey Streatfield) invites medium Madame Arcati (Jennifer Saunders) to his house for a seance as research for his next book.
But the seance summons the ghost of Charles’ glamorous first wife Elvira (Madeleine Mantock). Only Charles can see and hear her whereas his second wife Ruth (Lisa Dillon) cannot and, once summoned, Elvira refuses to depart.
The set up is ripe for revision but Richard Eyre’s production is relentlessly old-fashioned and Streatfield seems to have lost his customary lightness of touch.
Ruth’s torrential one-note screech is amusing for five minutes before becoming intolerable.
Rose Wardlaw’s eager-toplease maid Edith gallops around the stage until an Exorcist-style payoff when
Eyre references his own 1980 production of Hamlet in which Jonathan Pryce’s Prince was possessed by the spirit of his dead father.
But it is Saunders’ show and she proves once again to be a comedic actor of considerable skill.
Almost unrecognisable with untamed eyebrows and mannish voice, her brown skirt decorated with food stains, she presents the fully realised character of a robust English eccentric, though her bluff mannerisms conceal a girlish heart as she skips with delight at summoning an actual ghost.
Alas, Eyre’s gifts as a director seem to have gone to sleep as, aside from the few moments of banal illusion, there is very little here that is a) ghostly or b) magical. More worryingly, his sense of comic timing seems to have deserted him.
The inclusion of fart jokes cannot compensate for the lumbering speeches or his uninspired orchestration of the characters. This needn’t have been a museum piece dusted down for the tourist trade. But that’s precisely what it is.