Absohootely fabulous, Jen as the crackpot clairvoyant
THE ever fabulous Jennifer Saunders breezed into the West End last night as the gorgeously batty spirit medium Madame Arcati, in Noel Coward’s 1941 chestnut of a ghost comedy Blithe Spirit.
Saunders remains peerlessly brilliant in a turn first seen in Bath in 2019; but I can’t help feeling that Richard Eyre’s production may now be a little over-ripe.
It is still highly amusing, thanks to Saunders’ crackpot clairvoyant. She’s been hired by twice married novelist Charles Condomine (Geoffrey Streatfeild) to conduct a seance as research for a story he’s writing about a murderous mystic.
Charles’s second wife Ruth (Lisa Dillon) is under strict instructions to keep her doubts to herself; and the local doctor and his wife have also been told to keep schtum. But it all goes wrong when the ghost of Charles’s late first wife breaks through from the other side to wreak merry havoc.
It’s vintage, exquisitely plotted Coward, in which the first laugh should come right at the start – with the rattling tea tray borne in by Charles’s nervous new maid Edith (Rose Wardlaw).
But it’s not until what feels like a good 20 minutes in, with Saunders’ entrance, that we get our first reliable chuckles. Arriving at the rural bohemia of novelist Condomine’s Victorian gothic mansion, after having cycled seven miles, she makes herself comfortable – scratching her bosom, airing her thighs and knocking back a few martinis.
A little too much is made of some flatulence jokes after dinner – Coward was rarely so obvious. And was it my new glasses, or were Saunders’ eyebrows more comically embellished than last time I met Madame?
Either way, she’s deliciously possessed, and has, in the past two years, developed an eccentric hoot to express delight, alarm and displeasure.
In the second half she’s more sheepish, when accused of causing all the trouble. But then it’s back to battle, and on with the exorcism.
Streatfeild’s Charles has matured nicely as the former playboy novelist who’s going to seed with his club tie and country residence. His journey through doubt, horror and, finally, temptation, remains playfully arch, with moments of Basil Fawlty mania.
As his wife, Dillon has added a little more gammon. Where previously she greeted her rival’s apparition with rising panic, now she’s at the end of her tether – think Mrs Thatcher’s irritated little sister.
Not surprising, I suppose, given the threat posed by Madeleine Mantock as Ruth’s foe: Charles’s late first wife Elvira.
She may be deceased, but as Charles puts it, she’s still ‘overpoweringly demure’ in her shimmering silver dress and scarlet lipstick.
Maybe it was just the Pinter’s hot and stuffy auditorium, but Eyre’s production feels a little less zippy than in Bath. We, the audience, could have used a little more refrigeration from Coward’s icy wit.
That said, the show rallies for the chaos of the climax on Anthony Ward’s still pleasingly fusty set of a Victorian gothic mansion backed by a mountainside of books. And we’re sent home satisfied, after a glorious poltergeist finale.