Blithe Spirit Resumen

Blithe Spirit (play)
Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Nol Coward. The play concerns the socialite and
novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame
Arcati, to his house to conduct a sance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The
scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental
first wife, Elvira, after the sance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles's
marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.
The play was first seen in the West End in 1941, creating a new long-run record for nonmusical British plays of 1,997 performances. It also did well on Broadway later that year,
running for 657 performances. Coward adapted the play for film in 1945, starring Rex
Harrison, and directed a musical adaptation, High Spirits, on Broadway in 1964. It was
also adapted for television in the 1950s and 1960s and for radio. The play enjoyed
several West End and Broadway revivals in the 1970s and 1980s and was revived again
in London in 2004, 2011 and 2014. It returned to Broadway in February 2009.
Background[edit]
The title of the play is taken from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark", ("Hail to thee, blithe
Spirit! / Bird thou never wert").[1] For some time before 1941 Coward had been thinking of
a comedy about ghosts. His first thoughts centred on an old house in Paris, haunted by
spectres from different centuries, with the comedy arising from their conflicting
attitudes, but he could not get the plot to work in his mind. [2] He knew that in wartime
Britain, with death a constant presence, there would be some objection to a comedy
about ghosts,[3] but his firm view was that as the story would be thoroughly heartless,
"you can't sympathise with any of them. If there was a heart it would be a sad story."[2]
After his London office and flat had been destroyed in the Blitz, Coward took a short
holiday with the actress Joyce Carey at Portmeirion on the coast of Snowdonia in Wales.
She was writing a play about Keats, and he was still thinking about his ghostly light
comedy:
We sat on the beach with our backs against the sea wall and discussed my idea
exclusively for several hours. Keats, I regret to say, was not referred to. By lunchtime the
title had emerged together with the names of the characters, and a rough, very rough,
outline of the plot. At seven-thirty the next morning I sat, with the usual nervous
palpitations, at my typewriter. Joyce was upstairs in her room wrestling with Fanny
1
Brawne. There was a pile of virgin paper on my left and a box of carbons on my right.
The table wobbled and I had to put a wedge under one of its legs. I smoked several
cigarettes in rapid succession, staring gloomily out of the window at the tide running out.
I fixed the paper into the machine and started. Blithe Spirit. A Light Comedy in Three
Acts.
For six days I worked from eight to one each morning and from two to seven each
afternoon. On Friday evening, May ninth, the play was finished and, disdaining archness
and false modesty, I will admit that I knew it was witty, I knew it was well constructed,
and I also knew that it would be a success.[4]
Synopsis[edit]
Charles Condomine, a successful novelist, wishes to learn about the occult for a novel he
is writing, and he arranges for an eccentric medium, Madame Arcati, to hold a sance at
his house. At the sance, she inadvertently summons Charles's first wife, Elvira, who has
been dead for seven years. Madame Arcati leaves after the sance, unaware that she
has summoned Elvira. Only Charles can see or hear Elvira, and his second wife, Ruth,
does not believe that Elvira exists until a floating vase is handed to her out of thin air.
Elvira is louche and moody, in contrast to the more strait-laced Ruth. The ghostly Elvira
makes continued, and increasingly desperate, efforts to disrupt Charles's current
marriage. She finally sabotages his car in the hope of killing him so that he will join her in
the spirit world, but it is Ruth rather than Charles who drives off and is killed.
Ruth's ghost immediately comes back for revenge on Elvira, and though Charles cannot
at first see Ruth, he can see that Elvira is being chased and tormented, and his house is
in uproar. He calls Madame Arcati back to exorcise both of the spirits, but instead of
banishing them she unintentionally materialises Ruth. With both his dead wives now fully
visible, and neither of them in the best of tempers, Charles, together with Madame
Arcati, goes through sance after sance and spell after spell to try to exorcise them. It is
not until Madame Arcati works out that the housemaid, Edith, is psychic and had
unwittingly been the conduit through which Elvira was summoned that she succeeds in
dematerialising both ghosts. Charles is left seemingly in peace, but Madame Arcati,
hinting that the ghosts may still be around unseen, warns him that he should go far away
as soon as possible. Coward repeats one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of
the play, where the central character tiptoes out as the curtain falls a device that he
also used in Present Laughter, Private Lives and Hay Fever.[5] Charles leaves at once, and
the unseen ghosts throw things and destroy the room as soon as he has gone. (In the
2
David Lean film version, the ghosts thwart Charles's attempt to escape, and his car is
again sabotaged; he crashes and joins them as a ghost, with Elvira at one arm and Ruth
at the other.)

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