Blithe Spirit: An improbable farce in 3 acts

An essay by Dhriti Agarwal, MA181216

Introduction
Set in the “light, attractive and comfortably furnished living room” of the socialites Charles and Ruth
Condomine, Blithe Spirit is a full-length comic play that brings together supernatural elements in a
drawing room comedy to create “an improbable farce in 3 acts”.

This play – with its title taken from Shelley's poem "To a Skylark", ("Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou
never wert") is a “light comedy about death”. It revolves around the backfiring of Charles Condomine’s
plan to conduct a séance to gather jargon for his next book, which results in leaving him an “astral
bigamist” who must shuttle between “morally untidy” Elvira and Ruth with her “obtuse lack of
comprehension”.

About Noёl Coward

Noёl Coward – Blithe Spirit’s playwright – grew up around the stage and has been knighted “The
Master” for his success across several mediums. A glamorous socialite in his time, he wrote this play
within 6 days, soon after losing his house and office to The Blitz in 1941. “Disdaining archness and false
modesty,” he admitted, “I knew it was witty, I knew it was well constructed, and I also knew that it
would be a success.” He was right because the play “created a new long-run record for non-musical
British plays of 1,997 performances.”

Sociopolitical Context
During World War II, London had been under 57 consecutive nights of bombing or blitzkrieg (lightning
war) of The German Blitz. This conflict affected every aspect of life, including theatre – with air raids
disrupting performances daily. Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Heat of the Day paints a vivid picture of
London life in the war, “And it was now, when you no longer saw, heard, smelled war, that a deadening
acclimatisation to it began to set in. The first generation of ruins, cleaned up, shored up, began to
weather - in daylight they took their places as a norm of the scene; the dangerless nights of September
two years later blotted them out... This was the lightless middle of the tunnel”.

Theaters faced several operating difficulties, actors to stagehands were called up for war work, stage
costumes and makeup were rationed, day-time performances became common because of blackouts
and air raids disrupted performances. In addition, while elaborate Broadway musicals were immensely
popular, dramatic theater productions had a hard time attracting paying audiences. However, theatre
continued as an imaginative escape from the grim reality and the arts had a wider audience then, than
in peacetime. “Some airy devil hovers in the sky and pours down mischief but this England never did,
nor never shall, lie at the proud foot of a conqueror”. The programmes always include instructions on
what to do in the case of an air raid but many theatregoers preferred to stay put and enjoy the play. This
brings to mind John Keating’s quote in Dead Poets Society, "We don't read and write poetry because it's
cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is
filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to
sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for."

Theatre’s role in the 1940s society

By 1940, the government began to support the performing arts with a motivation beyond distracting
audiences weary of the war effort – to defend the values of the civilized world’s cultural heritage against
Nazi barbarism. Demands of “propaganda, nation-building and education” were put on drama, “the
sinew of the national soul”. A new egalitarianism emerged where “evening dress, the mark of bourgeois
respectability, disappeared”. Theatres became “morale-boosting rallying-points, places of refuge,
creating awareness about national heritage, escape routes for the imagination, the embodiment of
national defiance.”

While theatre from World War I had been characterized by cheap entertainment and pointless farces,
now, there was a revival of the role of classical drama of educating while entertaining. However, using
Blithe Spirit as a reference point, we realize that Coward had not moved on from the pointless, cheap
comedy of the past.

Blithe Spirit seems to be completely unrelated to the world it was written in. It fulfilled only the
entertainment criteria of the theatre of the time, leaving out education by being an “ideally escapist
entertainment which was flippant and careless about death and yet funny and sturdy enough to be a
constant source of joy and hilarity to theatregoers for the rest of the war.” The irony is heightened by
Coward as he notes, “opening night audiences had to walk across planks laid over the rubble caused by
a recent air raid to see a light comedy about death. In wartime Britain, with death a constant presence,
there would be objection to a comedy about ghosts, but you can't sympathise with any of
them...entertaining the audience is always the mind or heart-unlocking bit. Without entertainment it’s
just medicine.”

Theatre Form
Blithe Spirit is, as the very first line – “an improbable farce set in the Condomines’ living room” – makes
clear, suspended between 2 types of art, drawing room comedy and farce. While this form of farce and
drawing room comedy was regarded as less superior, scandalous and satirical of the upper class
idiosyncrasies – Blithe Spirit’s popularity is proof that this form is still relevant.

Taken from the Greek and Roman theatre traditions of having actors play stock characters like the jester
or glutton caught in exaggerated situations, interludes – with impromptu buffoonery stuffed in between
religious plays – evolved into farce. The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, Charlie Chaplin and
Marx Brothers are comedy-inducing dramas that use highly improbable situations, indecency,
stereotyped characters and exaggerated ribaldry to make the audience laugh. This form of theatre calls
for the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief and logic to provide them with a piece of an escapist
alternate reality. In Blithe Spirit, Coward creates comedic situations out of the social anxieties around
ideals of marriage, fidelity and death during the 1940s through the dull marriage of Ruth and Charles
and the recurring references to Elvira’s sexual adventures.

Drawing room comedies take place in the well-furnished living rooms, with French windows and
fireplaces, exactly like the Comdomines’ and are principally occupied with romantic inclinations,
intimacy and marriage through light-hearted comedy, without any grand message or value. With
carefully manufactured tension, improbable characters, appropriate suspense and trite denouements,
drawing room comedies are “part well-made play, part society drama and part comedy of manners”
devised for maximum theatrical impact. With the eccentricity of Madame Arcati, the “roguish flippancy”
of Charles and the “duel to death between Elvira and me [Ruth]”, it doesn’t get better than Blithe Spirit
for a drawing room comedy.
Themes
In Act I, Scene I itself, foreshadowing the future of the play with “prophetic foreboding”, Ruth
Condomine establishes the mystical element of the play by saying “Poor Elvira, Poor Charles and then,
Poor Ruth”. Throughout the play, Coward uses sceptical characters like Charles Condomine, Elvira and
Doctor Bradman to mock supernatural elements by “adroitly rationalizing supernatural phenomena as
colonic irritation”, marriages that are “on the rocks” and the didactic, puerile and academic idea of the
Victorian female as major themes. With Ruth – the dull wife who is etched out as the angel of the house
– and the maddening flapper figure of “morally untidy and ethereal” Elvira literally trapped in Charles’
home, Coward perpetuates the idea of an ideal English lifestyle before ironically turns it into Charles’
nightmare.

The open and casual discussions about controversial topics like abortion as something that “nobody
thinks anything of”, divorce as a joke, views of female psychology as “didactic, puerile and academic”,
psychoanalysis as “expensive humiliation only to be told that at the age of four, I was in love with my
rocking horse”(Charles Condomine, Act II, Scene I) and decline in faith in Act I, Scene I along with Ruth’s
attempts at giving Edith, the maid, deportment lesso can turn some heads, the way Pygmalion by
George Bernard Shaw did in 1913 with its commentary on the upper class sensibility. Combined with the
concepts of individual versus the common experience when Charles’ admission of hearing Elvira’s voice
is dismissed by Ruth because “nobody else did”, Blithe Spirit has a modernist tinge to it. However, by
painting the ghosts as angry, possessive, scheming, material and unromantic, Coward gets away with his
lack of respect for the dead. Writer and novelist Michael Korda wrote, “...while his plays, his lifestyle,
and his attitude toward sex, life, and marriage, were all, intended to infuriate the English middle-class,
he would eventually become the darling of just those people he was trying to mock.”

Elements of Theatre
The structure of Blithe Spirit consisted of exposition, complication, development, crisis and
dénouement, true to its dramatic form. Derived from Aristotleian concepts of unities of place and time
and action, the setting for Blithe Spirit, like a typical drawing room comedy, is in a restricted place and
time, putting the play’s central situation under a microscope. As discussed in Theatre Form, Blithe Spirit
also has characters taken directly from Greek theatre traditions like Charles Condomine and Madame
Arcati for comic relief.

A proscenium arch with an elaborate set, hidden wings, electric and sound effects contribute to the
constructed piece of reality that allows a willing suspension of disbelief while also being self-consciously
artificial.

Critical Reviews
After its first performance in Manchester, some of the critical reviews Blithe Spirit called it "an odd
mixture and not untouched by genius of a sort"(The Manchester Guardian), which was received with
“loud, though not quite unanimous acclaim. There was a solitary boo – from an annoyed spiritualist,
presumably”( London correspondent, The Guardian). Some critics called the play “common” and "a
wearisome exhibition of bad taste", but this seemed to be exactly what war-time Englad needed to
soothe its spirits.

Moodboard for Blithe Spirit

Keeping in mind the sociocultural context, a moodboard – with costumes and set designs for Blithe Spirit
– has been prepared (please refer to the.jpeg attached). While preparing the moodboard an integral
question that came up was how a ghost can be effectively represented onstage? What lights, sound
effects and form of movement might be used to illuminate the ghost’s presence and its actions?

How Blithe Spirit has changed over the years

With 1997 performances, Blithe Spirit was the longest running non-musical play before Agatha Christie’s
Mousetrap. When Mousetrap broke Blithe Sirit’s record, Coward wrote a telegram to Christie that read,
"Dear Agatha Christie, much as it pains me I really must congratulate you on The Mousetrap breaking
the long run record. All my good wishes, Noel Coward”. After first being performed in the West End in
1941, Coward himself directed a musical adaptation, High Spirits, on Broadway in 1964 and then
adapted the play for film in 1945. In blushing technicolour, the film did not do so well. But over the
years, it has been adapted for television and for radio before being revived again in the 1970s and 80s.

Every new director found ways to connect to the material: some personal attachments, additional
scenes, ways to fill a production with purpose. Taking recent examples, when Matthew Warchus
adapted Blithe Spirit, used 3 key pathways to lead to a version of Present Laughter, featuring Andrew
Scott. He changed the gender of some of the characters. as it “seemed like something Coward might
possibly have approved of and in truth doesn’t actually change the sexuality of the central character
who is already (albeit more discreetly) given both male and female sexual partners in the original script.”
In another college production, the lighting designer experimented with layering light filters to give the
setting a more supernatural feel, allowing for the setting to have several colour shifts across the stage. “I
want people to get sucked into the world and believe this magical and spiritual thing is happening,”
Dana Baker quotes.

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References
1. Coward, Noёl. Blithe Spirit, June 1941
2. ‘In Blushing Technicolor’: Colour in Blithe Spirit | Journal of British Cinema and Television
3. Matthew Warchus on Present Laughter | The Old Vic
4. Heinrich , A. Theatre in Britain during the Second World, 2010
5. Centaur.reading.ac.uk
6. Journal of British Cinema and Television
7. Janet Hastings, History in Focus: War – Leisure in London WWII
8. Classical Dramatic Structure, Math.brown.edu
9. Das, Sahana. “Drawing room theater.” Paper on Writing for the Ear, August 2020, Mount Carmel
College