Blithe Spirit, Civic Players, Swan Theatre, Yeovil

GENERALLY, when you go to the theatre, you expect (hope) to like or at least empathise with some or all of the characters – but not with Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit. All the characters – apart from the bumbling maid Edith – are more or less unpleasant. And Yeovil’s Civic Players production has absolutely nailed this – it would be hard to imagine a better cast of thoroughly unlikeable people!

And in that, they were following Coward’s own view of the play, which was first staged in the West End in 1941, where it ran for a staggering 1,997 performances, in the depths of the Second World War. The title was taken from Shelley’s poem To A Skylark – “Hail to thee, blithe spirit, Bird thou never wert.”

Coward had been thinking of a comedy about ghosts. His original idea had been spectres from different centuries in an old house in Paris – the comedy would come from their conflicting attitudes. But he could not get the plot to work. He realised that, in wartime Britain, there would be some objection to a comedy about ghosts, with death a constant presence. But he believed that, as the story of  Blithe Spirit was thoroughly heartless, so “you can’t sympathise with any of them.”

This Civic Players production, directed by Jay Westaway, captures that brittle humour beautifully. From the opening scene, you know you are in very safe hands, as Charlie Wanklin’s pitch-perfect Ruth snipes at her smooth-talking novelist husband Charles (Rich Walters, oozing self-confidence and masculine arrogance) for inviting the village eccentric, Madame Arcati (Liz Stallard), to hold a seance, as material for his next book.

They have invited Dr Bradman (Zack Welfare, subtly conveying the doctor’s imagined superiority to the other characters) and Mrs Bradman (Amy Phelps, as the downtrodden wife) for the seance. In due course the medium and clairvoyant arrives, with swirling robes and flapping feather headdress apparently not dislodged during her seven-mile bicycle ride! Liz Stallard, making her Civic Players stage debut, is utterly hilarious in a performance that is highly original, noisy, flamboyant, preposterous and utterly convincing.

Mysteriously – but, of course, predictably – the seance does “wake the dead” and Charles’s ex-wife Elvira appears, ghostly in silver-grey, from her hair to her slippered feet. Erin Darling-Finan is mercurial, flirtatious, petulant … all the reasons why Charles is happier mourning his late first wife than actually having her back in his life! And utterly infuriating for no-nonsense Ruth, who doesn’t necessarily see herself as beautiful or romantic, but is his (current) wife, and doesn’t want to share the house with an (invisible) rival!

Rich Walters is ghastly and very funny as Charles – he makes the passage from apparently happy, loving husband to ruthless and callous widower with barely a shrug of regret, doubtless just as Coward envisaged this articulate narcissist.

Pauline Withers as Edith, the clumsy maid, is baffled and nervous – as well she might be in this house where people drink too much, snap and snarl at each other and apparently talk to empty spaces!

This is one of the very best productions of Blithe Spirit I have ever seen, and I have seen many.

It continues to Saturday 1st June. Civic Players will be back in the cosy world of domestic strife later in the year with Jack Sharkey’s mystery farce, The Murder Room, from 4th to 7th December.

 

FAC

 

 

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