Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

Blithe Spirit The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2011, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover photo: Arthur Hanket (left) as Charles, Stephanie Erb as Elvira, and Carole Healey as Ruth in Blithe Spirit, 2004 Contents BlitheInformation Spirit on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6

Scholarly Articles on the Play An Improbable Farce 7 Some Sort of Genius 9 Noel Coward as the Mirror of a Generation 10

Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: Blithe Spirit Charles Condomine, a novelist, and his wife, Ruth, have invited their friends Dr. and Mrs. Bradman to join them for drinks and dinner with a local clairvoyant, Madame Arcati. Charles is plan- ning a novel about a homicidal spiritualist and wants to observe the behavior of Madame Arcati during a séance after dinner. The Bradmans arrive, and the four friends discuss Madame Arcati, sure that she will be a harmless fraud. They are interrupted when Madame Arcati arrives, dinner is served, and the séance begins. Much to the surprise of the two couples, there are supernatural manifestations--the table trembles, Madame Arcati falls into a trance, and Charles hears the voice of Elvira, his first wife, whom he loved dearly but who died several years ago. Frightened, he wakes Madame Arcati, and the party breaks up. As Charles shows the Bradmans out, in walks the ghost of Elvira, gray from head to foot. Only Charles can see and hear her, and he and Ruth immediately quarrel about her presence. The cross- conversation between Charles and Ruth and Charles and Elvira is exasperating to Ruth, who, believing Charles drunk, goes off to bed in a huff. The next morning at breakfast, Ruth is very cool to Charles and insists that he had too much to drink the night before. When he insists that he had a hallucination, Ruth attributes it to indigestion. The bickering continues until Elvira enters, carrying roses. When Charles sees her, a comical miscom- munication begins, with Ruth unable to see or hear Elvira and feeling certain that Charles’s unpleasant remarks are meant for her. Ruth becomes convinced her husband is mad and tries to soothe him and go for a doctor. Charles, frantic to be believed, enlists Elvira’s help, and she moves a bowl of flowers around the room to prove her existence. Ruth becomes hysterical, not sure whether she is being delud- ed, is going insane, or is actually in the presence of a ghost. Later, alone, Ruth visits with Madame Arcati again--and is shocked and angered that Madame Arcati is unable to dematerialize Elvira and also believes that Charles subconsciously wanted Elvira back. When Ruth is rude to her, the spiritualist leaves in a huff. Elvira and Charles enter, and Elvira seems delighted that she will be a permanent guest. Ruth swears to rid herself of the ghost. Suspense builds when, several days later, both Edith (the maid) and Charles have accidents--Edith because of axle grease rubbed on the stairs and Charles on a ladder that proves to have been sawed nearly in two. Ruth insists, and Charles is convinced, that Elvira is trying to kill Charles in order to have him for herself again. Ruth leaves in the car, which Elvira had booby-trapped for Charles, and is killed in the ensuing “accident.” The act ends with Elvira frantically retreating from Ruth’s ghost, invis- ible to Charles. Charles calls Madame Arcati, who goes into a trance to try and dematerialize Elvira. It works in reverse, though, and in walks the ghost of Ruth, now plainly visible, along with Elvira, to Charles. After trying all sorts of supernatural tricks, Madame Arcati is about to despair; the ghosts simply will not go away. Then she realizes that it was not Charles who called up Elvira and Ruth--it was Edith. The maid, when discovered, is contrite, and Madame Arcati hypnotizes her; and the ghosts vanish at last. Suggesting that Charles travel for awhile, Madame Arcati exits. Charles, now alone, but not really alone, teases Ruth and Elvira about how much he will enjoy his freedom. Vases crash into the fireplace, pictures come crashing down, the mantel topples--and the cur- tain falls.

4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: Blithe Spirit CHARLES CONDOMINE: In his forties, Charles is an intelligent and urbane English nov- elist. Charles is the husband of Ruth Condomine and deceased first wife, Elvira. RUTH CONDOMINE: A smart looking woman in her mid-thirties, Ruth is the wife of Charles. She is a bit jealous of Charles’s relationship with his first wife. DR. BRADMAN: A pleasant-looking middle-aged man, Dr. Bradman is a friend of the Condomines. MRS. BRADMAN: The wife of Dr. Bradman, Mrs. Bradman is middle-aged and a bit faded. MADAME ARCATI: A middle-aged spiritualist, Madame Arcati is a striking woman. She is not too extravagant but has a definite bias towad the barbaric. ELVIRA: Charles Condomine’s deceased first wife, Elvira returns as a ghost with a goal. In the process, she makes Charles’s and Ruth’s lives very complicated. EDITH: The Condomine’s maid, Edith is always in a hurry.

About the Playwright:

Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Noel Coward Noel Pierce Coward was born on 16 December 1899. His family on his father’s side was very talented musically, and they helped nurture the natural virtuosity of the child, instilling in him a lifelong love of music. Also, his mother took him to the theatre every year on his birth- day, and, as he grew older, he found these junkets more and more fascinating and upon return- ing home would rush to the piano and play by ear the songs from the production he had just seen. He made his first public appearance, singing and accompanying himself on the piano, at a concert held at Miss Willington’s School. Though obviously a very talented child, Coward’s precocity did not carry over to his formal education. At best, his schooling was sporadic. He was indulged by his mother, who became the stereotypical stage mother during his early years, and it was at his mother’s insistence that he began attending Miss Janet Thomas’s Dancing Academy in addition to his regular school in London. Soon, Miss Thomas’s school usurped the position of importance held by traditional academic fare, and Coward became a child per- former. Coward’s first professional engagement, and that which launched his long career, was on 27 January 1911 in a children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after for children’s roles by other professional theatres. He was featured in several productions with Sir Charles Hawtrey, a light comedian, whom Coward idolized and to whom he virtually appren- ticed himself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting tech- niques and playwriting. At the tender age of twelve, Coward met one of the actresses who would help contribute to his overwhelming success, Gertrude Lawrence; she was then fifteen and a child performer as well. The acting team of Coward and Lawrence would become synonymous with polished, sophisticated comedy during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. Coward began his writing career when he was sixteen by writing songs and selling them for distribution. He turned his hand to playwriting when he was seventeen and found that he was very good at writing dialogue. By 1919, his play I’ll Leave It to You was produced in the West End with Coward in the leading role. One of the idiosyncrasies of Coward’s writing is that often he wrote “whacking good parts” for himself or for people he knew. Some of his best plays are essentially vehicles for his own talents or those of Gertrude Lawrence and later of the Lunts. I’ll Leave It to You met with moderate success, and Coward received great praise from critics for his play-writing abilities. Coward went to New York for the first time in 1921 and arrived virtually penniless; however, although he may have begun the 1920s in penury, his position as the most popular playwright in the English theatre became secure during this decade. In 1924, The Vortex, Coward’s most important serious play, was produced in London. The years from 1928 to 1934 were regarded by many as Coward’s “golden years.” His string of successes include This Year of Grace, Bitter Sweet, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Words and Music, Design for Living, and Conversation Piece. In 1941 he wrote the record-breaking Blithe Spirit, which ran for 1,997 performances in London. After World War II, Coward fell from grace with many critics, who regarded him as being past his literary prime. However, by the late 1950s, audiences were once again in love with him. His plays, revues, and nightclub appearances were extremely successful. The critics, however, remained vitriolic, but their rancor failed to dim the enthusiasm of the general theatre-going public, which clamored for more Coward plays.

6 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 On January 1, 1970, Coward was honored by the queen as a knight bachelor for services rendered to the arts. In the same year, he was awarded a special Tony Award by the American theatre for distinguished achievement in the theatre. In 1972, he received an honorary doctor of letters from the University of Sussex. Coward died of a heart attack in Jamaica on 26 March 1973, bringing to an end a career of more than sixty years in the theatre.

Blithe Spirit: An Improbable Farce From Insights, 1992 Noel Coward subtitled Blithe Spirit “an improbable farce,” and it is, not only because it asks the audience to believe in the supernatural but also because its humor turns on the idea that the supernatural world has a pattern of manners much like ours. Suspending disbelief comes easily to audiences of this play. The playgoer knows from the opening moments, when the Condomines and Bradmans are so sure that ghosts cannot appear, that almost certainly something will happen to prove them wrong. Madame Arcati is a trustworthy link between “here” and “the other side”; she is so much more down-to-earth, for all of her clairvoyance and bizarre dress, than the rather superficial and over-sophisticated Condomines. She rides a bicycle, likes to eat, openly shows enthusiasm, and speaks in Girl Scout clichés. If such a woman believes in ghosts, it would be very hard for a self-respecting audience not to play along. This belief is central to the play’s humor--the butts of the jokes often are the foolish characters who refuse to believe in Elvira’s presence. Elvira is not merely a believable ghost, she is a ghost who pouts, teases, whines, manipu- lates--in short, does exactly what she did when alive. Elvira has not mellowed at all in the after- life, which she describes as an extended cocktail party where she played chess with Genghis Khan and watched Merlin do magic tricks. Her jealousy of Charles and Ruth drives her finally toward murder in order to win him back. Yet there is not much to be feared from death (even murder) in this play. After all, life on the other side seems to be just like life here, only gray. Blithe Spirit is a farcical version of one of the staples of comedies of manners, the domestic disagreement. The play hinges on the triangle--husband and loving wife separated by jealous former wife (who happens to be dead). The playgoer wants them to triumph, to banish Elvira and return to bliss--or does he? After all, with her spontaneity and love of living, Elvira displays considerable charm. Once Coward starts manipulating audience sympathy, it is a short step to cheering for the ghosts of Ruth and Elvira as they try to beat Charles in the final act. Much of what makes this play so charming, however, are the effects that cannot be seen on the written page, but must be experienced on the stage. First are the stage tricks, such as the floating bowl of flowers and the crashing crockery and pictures in the final scene. Additionally, there are some nice visual touches. Elvira is an ordinary fashionable, sophisticated woman, made ghostly by being gray from head to toe. When Ruth dies, the effect doubles; now there are two gray matrons competing for attention. However, the principal difference between read- ing and seeing Blithe Spirit is in the comedic effect of overlapping simultaneous dialogue. On the page, the reader can follow only one speaker per line; on the stage, words are tennis balls

Utah Shakespeare Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 being flung from person to person, tossed above heads and below belts. In fact, most of the humor in Blithe Spirit turns on the question, who knows the most? The audience and the Condomines begin on the same level, educated and worldly and convinced that all this spiritual business is nonsense. Then the level of awareness shifts, with the audience and Charles joining Madame Arcati in knowing that ghosts exist, and Ruth’s skepticism now makes her the foolish one. Then there is another shift--Charles and Ruth know about Elvira and attempt to conceal their knowledge from the Bradmans. Toward the end, Charles, Ruth, Elvira, and the audience know even more than Madame Arcati about ghosts and their behavior. These changing levels of awareness keep the farce from falling flat after the first scene or two of miscommunica- tion between the real world and the other side; nobody, especially the playgoer, can be quite sure of what he knows.

Blithe Spirit: Some Sort of Genius By Susan E. Gunter

8 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 From Souvenir Program, 1992 In his autobiography, Future Indefinite, Noel 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. Blithe Spirit opened on July 2, 1941, in the Piccadilly Theatre in London and became an instant and overwhelming success. 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-rid- den world that Coward had created, a world he himself said was “on a plane just above reality.” Blithe Spirit opens with a mature, sophisticated married couple, Charles and Ruth Condomine, who live rational and orderly lives in the English countryside near Kent. Writer Charles, who is beginning a new novel called The Unseen (one of the play’s many small iro- nies), has asked medium Madame Arcati to come to their home and conduct a séance as part of his “research” for the book. Madame Arcati, a delightful character who goes everywhere on her bicycle and has most recently written a children’s book featuring a moss beetle as hero, challenges all of the Condomines’ rational assumptions concerning reality in a drawing room comedy of the highest order. Madame Arcati, using as her control a child named Daphne, proceeds in her séance to call up the ghost (“protoplasmic manifestation”) of Charles’s first wife, Elvira, who has been dead for seven years. As the gramophone plays the tune, “Always,” the table bangs about, Madame Arcati screams and falls from her stool, and Charles hears a ghostly voice. Elvira, whose flamboyant and irreverent personality contrasts markedly with Ruth’s sen- sible, efficient nature, can be seen and heard by Charles but no one else. Much of the play’s sub- sequent wry humor turns on the device of double meanings: Charles’s remarks to the ghostly Elvira are heard and misunderstood by Ruth, providing in effect a dramatic and exaggerated illustration of how married couples often fail to communicate to one another. Ruth, at first skeptical of Elvira’s “reality,” seeks formulaic explanations for Charles’s odd behavior, attributing his strange remarks to too much alcohol or a nervous breakdown. Elvira’s blithe attitude counterpoints Ruth’s stolidness, and even Madame Arcati, who when called back to the house later refuses to try to recall Elvira because she has just eaten pigeon pie and cucumber sandwiches for lunch, tells Ruth that, “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Mrs. Condomine.” As Elvira’s “blithe spirit” turns bad, however, the audience must be willing to suspend disbelief and accept the play’s ghostly conventions. Elvira upsets the balance that Charles and Ruth have created in their relationship, making them realize that their rules of conduct do not apply in the larger context of the unexplainable mysteries of life and death, as Coward’s farcical plotting and witty dialogue combine to produce a technically skillful play that has entertained audiences for over four decades.

Blithe Spirit: Noel Coward as the Mirror of a Generation By Lynnette L. Horner

Utah Shakespeare Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 From Insights, 2004 “I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift than enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war” (Noël Coward, quoted at Methuen, “Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward,” http://www.methuen.co.uk/blithespirit.html (accessed 8 April 2004). Written and produced in the thick of World War II in 1941, one might ask the question, what was there about that time and place that would inspire the creation of one of the most popular and long-running comedies; “an improbable farce in three acts”? What chord did it strike in audiences that were for the second time living through the dreariness of black outs, air raids, rationing, and the heartbreaking casualty lists caused by war fought on home soil? A look back to the author’s beginnings may give us some insight. Noël Coward was born in December 1899, and thus, was in the interesting position of growing up with a new century. Born to middle class parents of no small musical talent, Coward was weaned on amateur and professional theatri- cal productions. His father, a piano salesman, was very good at musical improvisation, and Coward fol- lowed in his father’s footsteps. Nurtured in this atmosphere, he was in constant demand to perform, first, on his home turf and then in amateur productions. An avid observer of people, Coward developed the talent of picking up the eccentric nuances in people that made interesting characters who translated well to the stage and screen. And whereas some of his contemporaries dramatized the deep and hard aspects of life evolving through the industrial age, he chose to orbit in social circles that were the epitome of glam- our, many times frivolous with a tinge of cynicism. In large measure, Coward’s life, experience, and career mirrored the birth of a century and the growing pains of a generation. At the tender age of ten, Coward convinced his mother to answer an advertisement announcing the audition for young boys to be part of a prestigious children’s theatrical group. Of the hundreds of let- ters submitted, there was something in Noël’s mother’s letter that piqued interest, and Noël was invited to audition. His natural charm and stage presence was apparent and his young feet were firmly planted on his life’s course as he joined his new theatre family. During this time, he made friends with a young Gertrude Lawrence who became a lifetime co-star and dear friend. He also befriended another young actress, Esme Wynne, who later became a successful novelist and inspired Noël to add writing to his list of talents. As a young eighteen-year-old, drunk with his success on the stage and full of high, youthful ambi- tions, Noël had not felt much impact from World War I. But, in 1918, he was called up and, although found physically unfit for active service, was assigned to serve nine months in the Artists Rifles. He was miserable with this interruption in his career. By the time he entered the war, England was well past the glamour of patriotism and was tired of the rationing, black outs, and general misery the war brought to their shores. In some measure, it was a response of escapism from the weariness of war that inspired the spectacle productions that were spun sugar, superficial and with a dash of cynicism that characterized the 1920s era. Coward was in the thick of it and whether he simply mirrored social mores of the time, or as some criticized, created them, his plays during the twenties were considered sometimes immoral and shocking. They were wildly popular. A commentary of the opening night of The Vortex on his twenty-sixth birth- day acknowledges the “which came first” argument of whether art imitates life or vice verse. “Noël’s first nights had already attained fever-pitch of excitement they were never to lose. Celebrities predominated: film and stage stars, usually one or two members of the Royal family, and socialites galore with their concomitant Rolls Royces, furs and jewels. They were beginning to talk a language of their own: St. John Ervine had already complained at having to sit next to a litter of them with their ‘too divine’ and ‘simply marvelous darlings’. Whether the bright young things were trying to copy Noël’s characters, who Mrs. Patrick Campbell said ‘talked like typewriting’, or whether Noël was holding up the mirror to the socialites is not easy to decide, but one may suspect that it was the former” (Cole Lesley,

10 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Graham Payn, and Sheridan Morely, Noël Coward and His Friends [New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1979], 58). Fast forward through the thirties during which time, Coward continued acting, producing, writ- ing, and singing on both sides of the Atlantic. To America he brought his signature brand of sophis- ticated comedy. The United States repaid the favor by infusing his work with pacing and energy, not common before in British theatre. Coward’s maturity is also apparent in his political interest and involvement in the historical events leading to World War II. In stark contrast from his eighteen-year-old annoyance at World War I interrupting his otherwise idyllic lifestyle, Coward was a passionate vocal opponent of the policy of appeasement that led to World War II. His desire was to take an active, significant role during the war, and for a short time worked for British propaganda in Paris. He had hoped this would lead to an official war job working with the Navy. Because of Coward’s high profile persona, Winston Churchill was opposed to it. It was decided the greatest part he could play would be to entertain the troops and spent many of the war years spanning the globe, to Africa, Europe, and India (Lesley, 132 133). In 1941, Britain was again war weary and the toll of death and loss touched every level of soci- ety. The spiritualist movement (the belief that the dead can communicate with the living through a medium) had crossed the Atlantic from America and had had four decades to line up its believers and debunkers. Coward, ever in tune with societal undercurrents, spun a tale in Blithe Spirit that is an escape from the horror of war, yet deals with its most terrible cost, death, with a light hand. He deftly wove this with a poke at cynicism and the subliminal suggestion of “be careful what you ask for.” Noël Coward’s public responded and, “Blithe Spirit remained the longest running comedy in British theatre for three decades” (Methuen). The irresistible combination of urbane humor, intrigu- ing characters, and enough surprise to keep things interesting still delights as Blithe Spirit continues to delight today’s audiences as it did half a century ago.

Utah Shakespeare Festival 11 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880