NOEL Coward’s timeless comedy Blithe Spirit was just the thing war-ravaged Londoners needed in 1941, and it might just provide the lift we need in these crazy, frightening days 84 years later.

Anthony Banks’ new production is played out on a stylish set designed by Terry Parsons, an opulent Art Deco drawing room with its French doors leading out to the garden. In it are the paintings, ornaments, photographs and furniture you might expect from a famous writer, albeit one with a bit of writers’ block. He is Charles Condomine – entitled, suave, handsome and supercilious. He lives with his (second) wife Ruth, but in the shadow of his first wife Elvira, who was glamorous, scheming and a bit on the duplicitous side before her untimely death some seven years earlier.

Charles is writing a book about a homicidal spiritualist medium, and he wants to add a bit of authenticity to the characterisation. Discovering a noted psychic living in the village, he invites her round to dinner, along with his sceptical friend Dr Bradman and his wife. Madame Arcati is famously eccentric, and arrives after a seven mile cycle ride from her home all set for a seance … she’s been having them since she was five, after all!

But just as the Condomines and the Bradmans struggle to suppress their giggles as Madame A struts and waves and collapses, a chill air enters the room ….. and who should appear through the doors but Elvira?

Blithe Spirit was created by The Master in just five days, and then performed on the London stage. It has hardly spent a week unplayed since then, and this Salisbury production, which goes on to the The Grand in Blackpool, proves again just how sparklingly witty, brilliantly perceptive and archly bitchy Coward could be. Listen out for the one-liners that cut to the core of human nature, as the characters gradually unpeel to reveal their true natures.

Susan Wooldridge, still best known as the dewy-eyed innocent in the 1984 Jewel in the Crown, approaches the legendary role of Madame Arcati with a humble seriousness and jolly-hockey-sticks bravado that never crosses the cured pork line … and that’s unusual for a famous actress.

She is joined by Adam Jackson-Smith’s shiftily objectionable Charles, Jenny Rainsford’s waspish, passive-aggressive Ruth and Bridgette Amofah’s schemingly willowy Elvira, with Gabrielle Foley as the very peculiar maid, Edith.

It’s a delight, and it runs until 25th October.

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Photographs by Pamela Raith