PROGRAM GUIDE TABLE OF CONTENTS SYNOPSIS 3 HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT 5 COWARD LETTER REGARDING THE OPENING 8 NOËL COWARD 9 THE FIRST NOËL 13 WHY NOËL NOW? 16 NOËL COWARD CAREER HIGHLIGHTS 18 RESOURCES 25 2014 West End Revival. Photo by Johan Persson TABLE OF CONTENTS 2 SYNOPSIS Written in 1941 First presented by H.M Tennent Ltd. and John C. Wilson at the Opera House, Manchester, on 16 June 1941. Subsequently presented at the Piccadilly Theatre, London, on 2 July 1941. Transferred to the St James’s Theatre, 23 March, 1942. Transferred to the Duchess Theatre, 6 October 1942 (1,997 performances). ACT I In the living room of her pleasant house in Kent, Ruth Condomine and her husband, the writer Charles Condomine, have planned a séance in order to get copy for Charles’ next book. They have invited their friends, Dr and Mrs Bradman, and have enlisted the local medium, Madame Arcati, for the job. After the guests have arrived and dined, they sit down for the séance. Soon the table is moving and Arcati announces that someone wishes to speak to Mr Condomine. Charles reacts flippantly before Arcati goes into a trance and, with a scream, she falls to the floor. Out of the chaos, Charles’ previous wife, Elvira, is inadvertently conjured but only Charles can see or hear her. After their guests have left, Charles’ attempts to shut Elvira up, which Ruth takes as being addressed to herself, cause an argument between husband and wife. Ruth goes upstairs in a temper leaving Charles and Elvira alone together. ACT II At breakfast next morning Ruth is still annoyed with Charles, fully convinced that he had been very rude to her the previous evening. When Elvira enters with a bunch of roses and begins to talk to her, Ruth can stand it no longer and bursts into tears believing her husband is out of his mind. She finally believes him when Elvira smashes a vase into the grate. She immediately appeals to Madame Arcati, who comes over to tea. When Ruth asks her to exorcise Elvira, Arcati has to admit that she does not know how. Meanwhile, the Condomine’s maid Edith has fallen down the stairs and Charles has hurt his arm on account of a ladder breaking leading Ruth to become convinced Elvira is trying to kill him so she can have him to herself on the astral plane. She drives over to Madame Arcati for desperate help not realising that Elvira has indeed tampered with the car in the hope that Charles would drive her to a cinema in Folkestone and 2014 West End Revival. Photo by Johan Persson he would be killed. Instead, Charles receives a telephone call – it’s Ruth who has crashed and been killed. ACT III A few days later, Madame Arcati has come to call on Charles confessing that had she not walked out in a huff the tragedy might not have happened. She offers to help him dematerialise the spirits. Meanwhile, Elvira is very much upset after several days of Ruth’s company and declares she wants to go home after arguing with Charles over events in their marriage. Madame Arcati proceeds to the exorcism. Elvira, enjoying the spectacle hugely, nevertheless remains unaffected. Suddenly the window curtains part and Ruth enters. The two spirit-wives find their situation intolerable and wish to get away. However, one séance after another has failed to shift them. Arcati soon realises that they are not materialising through her but through someone else in the house and she immediately alights on the Condomine’s maid, Edith. She sends Edith into a trance and gradually the voices of Ruth and Elvira disappear. After advising Charles to go away for a voyage, Madame Arcati leaves. However, the blithe spirits have not disappeared and Charles insists that he is going to get out of their reach meanwhile adding some difficult home truths about both of them. Their reaction is an outbreak of chaotic poltergeist activity – Charles exits the house just as the overmantel crashes to the floor and the curtain pole comes tumbling down. Taken from The Theatrical Companion to Coward (2000) Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson, updated by Barry Day and Sheridan Morley SYNOPSIS 3 HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT BLITHE SPIRIT (written for the programme for the West End Production, 2014) “IF LOVE WERE ALL, I SHOULD BE LONELY” – Bitter Sweet It all began with the actress Joyce Carey. On May 2nd 1941 she took a train for Portmeirion in North Wales. She’d had one of her plays, Sweet Aloes, produced in the West End and was now working on another based on Keats and Fanny Brawne. As a travelling companion, she took her great friend Noël Coward. When they returned to London six days later, Joyce was still wrestling with Fanny Brawne. Coward had the completed manuscript of Blithe Spirit. “ For some time past an idea for a light comedy had been rattling at the door of my mind, and I thought the time had come to let it in and show it a little courtesy…. Beyond a few typographical errors, I made no corrections, and only two lines of the original script were ultimately cut.” The play opened only a month later on 16th June in Manchester, and then at London’s Piccadilly Theatre on 2nd July. It ran for 1997 performances, outlasting the War (a West End record until The Mousetrap overtook it). Some early critics were sceptical of the subject matter. How could audiences be expected to find death amusing in the middle of a war? Yet, clearly they did. The Daily Mail summed it up as “fantastic fun” and, paraphrasing Shelley, concluded: Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit, Bird thou’ll never get. And it never has, even though it’s one of the most revived of his plays. Coward gave the play the subtitle “An Improbable Comedy” but Harold Pinter sensed a deeper meaning, common to many of Coward’s major plays. When he directed a revival of Blithe Spirit at The National Theatre in 1976, Pinter insisted to his cast at the start of rehearsals that he considered the play to be neither improbable nor a comedy. He had already realised from a study of Private Lives that “a character could stand on a stage and say one thing and the audience would know he actually meant something else!” Pinter would elaborate on that insight in his own work ever Angela Lansbury 2014 West End Revival after. So, when anyone claims that Coward was Pinteresque, the appropriate Photo by Johan Persson response is that Pinter is Cowardesque. Comedy was always Coward’s way of making a serious point. “I am light-minded. I would inevitably write a comedy if – God help me! – I wanted to write a play with a message.” Perhaps it was his deliberate intention to appear trivial, never to wear his heart anywhere near his sleeve. What he might have said was that he realised that Comedy and Tragedy are essentially two sides of the same coin. With the twenty-twenty clarity of hindsight, however, it becomes clear that beneath the brittle carapace of witty words, much of his work had as its unifying theme the tragic Impossibility of Love. HISTORY OF BLITHE SPIRIT 5 In Private Lives, Elyot and Amanda cannot live with each other or without each other. In their struggle, which will go on after they steal away and the play ends, they leave the debris of everyone who comes near them, and will go on doing so, for this is not an ending but an intermission. They are unconscious killers. The same thing happens in Design For Living for Gilda, Otto and Leo. The secondary characters who cross their paths are irrelevant to their selfish needs and casually discarded as they work out the variations in their romance-à-trois. Others must clean up the emotional mess. In Fallen Angels, Julia and Jane have settled for predictably boring marriage until the prospect of a visit from the Gallic lover they had once shared suggests the possibility of an old flame rekindling the odd ember. In Blithe Spirit, Charles Condomine is, for the purposes of the play, a bigamist. As played by Cecil Parker in the original production, he is a conventional middle-aged man, comfortable, if not ecstatic, in his second marriage to Ruth. Then the shade of his first wife, Elvira, returns, reminding him of the lows and also a few of the highs of what once was. He is initially intrigued by having two women fighting over suburban old him. Before long however, this unquiet life rapidly palls an essentially quiet man and soon his only ambition is to be rid of them both. This was the intrinsic element that Parker’s interpretation brought to the story, and which has often been lost in subsequent productions. Blithe Spirit is only incidentally about ghosts and the hereafter. It’s really about marital discord in the present continuing for all time. The Impossibility of Love, doubled. When David Lean directed the film version of Blithe Spirit in 1944, Rex Harrison was cast as Charles. Harrison was reluctant to play the part and insisted that if he did, he would play it as his fans expected to see him, as “sexy Rexy”. His characterisation missed the point but ironically, thanks to the requirements of the Film Censor, he ends up in the cinematic afterlife with both wives to nag him for all eternity. Coward’s expressed view of love and marriage was consistent from very early on.