Blithe Spirit | The Guardian

TV tonight: it's all go in espionage drama Deutschland 89

Phil Harrison, Ali Catterall, Hannah J Davies and Paul Howlett — Fri, 12 Mar 2021 06:20:02 GMT

Martin is approached by a raft of initialed organisations. Plus: a special edition of Gardenders’ World. Here’s what to watch this evening

Judi Dench: 'In my mind's eye I'm six foot and willowy and about 39'

Xan Brooks — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 06:00:40 GMT

At 86 and in lockdown, the actor finds herself in the rare position of not working. Instead, she talks about theatrical ghosts, her friendship with Harvey Weinstein and definitely not being a national treasure

It’s all go for Judi Dench, stuck at her house in deepest Surrey. What a freewheeling week; she is beside herself with excitement. Yesterday, she explains, she received her Covid vaccine. This required a trip to the village and was the first time she had left home since she can’t remember when. Then today it’s a phone interview, the thing she is doing right now. Her cup runneth over. Her world has turned Technicolor. “I’m not even joking,” she says with a sigh. “It’s nice to actually have something to do.”

Lockdown, I fear, is not the life Dench was born to. She used to practically eat and drink on the stage, but the theatres have closed, who knows for how long. She used to bounce from one film set to the next, but now production is mothballed and the industry has gone to ground. All of which means that she is confined to the house, an 86-year-old actor shoved into what she hopes is a partial and temporary retirement. She gets up each morning determined to keep herself busy. She crawls back to bed with most of the tasks left undone. After a while, she admits, the time starts to drag.

Blithe Spirit review – unhappy reimagining of Coward's classic

Simran Hans — Sun, 17 Jan 2021 11:30:04 GMT

Not even Judi Dench can save this feeble remake of the playwright’s 1941 comedy

This asinine adaptation of Noël Coward’s 1941 stage play stars Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens as author Charles Condomine, who accidentally summons the playful ghost of his late first wife after participating in an ill-advised seance. Stevens plays Condomine as a cliche of a blocked writer, emboldened by booze and misogyny, knee-deep in discarded drafts of a screenplay based on his bestselling crime novel.

Edward Hall’s film attempts to send up Condomine for leeching off a female muse, which clashes somewhat with the source material’s “blithe” mood. The impish Leslie Mann is well cast as his dead wife, Elvira, who provides a jolt of creative inspiration. Judi Dench’s screechy caricature of psychic Madame Arcati is less winning.

On Sky Cinema

That's the spirit! Judi Dench reveals how a clairvoyant chose her name

Dalya Alberge — Sun, 03 Jan 2021 07:58:19 GMT

The Oscar-winning star, who plays the eccentric Madame Arcati in a new film of Blithe Spirit, says her name was revealed to her parents by a famous 1930s medium

Choosing the right name for a child is a difficult job. Inspiration can come from popular culture or from family, but for Judi Dench’s parents it came from a chance meeting with a medium.

The Oscar-winning actress has recalled the story ahead of the release of Blithe Spirit, a major screen adaptation of Noël Coward’s masterly comedy about the afterlife, ghosts and a love that just won’t die.

The many incarnations of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit – in pictures

Fri, 06 Mar 2020 15:54:00 GMT

With Jennifer Saunders playing Madame Arcati in London, and a new film adaptation with Judi Dench on the way, we look back at productions starring Angela Lansbury, Joanna Lumley and many more

Blithe Spirit review – Richard Eyre's skilfully crafted revival

Clare Brennan — Sun, 23 Jun 2019 07:00:40 GMT

Theatre Royal Bath
Jennifer Saunders stars as Madame Arcati in this touching production of the Coward classic

When Charles summons a psychic to perform a seance in his home so that he can observe the “tricks of the trade” and use them as the basis for his next novel, he gets more than he bargained for.

Noël Coward’s 1941 play and its 1945 film version (about to be remade) are such perennial national spirit-raisers that it is no spoiler to say what happens next: Charles’s deceased wife, the beautiful, ever-young Elvira, returns and only Charles, it seems, can see or hear her, much to the exasperation of his second wife, Ruth.

Blithe Spirit: Dame Judi to raise Britain’s spirits as Coward’s mystic madame

Dalya Alberge — Sat, 15 Jun 2019 12:59:20 GMT

New film of 1941 play hopes to heal a haunted country

In 1941 when Britain was at the mercy of the Blitz, the staging of Noël Coward’s classic play Blithe Spirit, a comedy about death, was considered a risk. But it turned out to be a big hit, with a record run in the West End and then Broadway before being turned into a film four years later starring Rex Harrison.

Now the director of a new version of the film and one of its lead actors, Dame Judi Dench, feel that the “dark space” we are currently in provides another fittingly gloomy backdrop for the release of a production that they hope will lift people’s spirits.

Blithe Spirit review – Nichola McAuliffe is an Arcati to savour

Alfred Hickling — Tue, 20 May 2014 11:51:24 GMT

York Theatre Royal
Nichola McAuliffe is glorious as Noël Coward's batty psychic in a production that's short of paranormal shocks

The acclaim with which Angela Lansbury's Madame Arcati has been greeted in the West End suggests two things: that Blithe Spirit is as popular as ever and that one of Noël Coward's most meticulously engineered comedies is now chiefly regarded as a star turn for a batty, suburban psychic.

Though Damian Cruden's York production is unlikely to redress the balance, Nichola McAuliffe's anarchic Welsh Arcati is still something to savour. She blows in wearing enough red velvet to reupholster the stalls, saucer-eyed and scenting ectoplasm like a sniffer dog approaching a suspicious suitcase.

Blithe Spirit review – Angela Lansbury's happy medium

Susannah Clapp — Sun, 23 Mar 2014 00:05:00 GMT

Gielgud, London
The Broadway veteran plays a magnificently dotty Madame Arcati in this remarkable production of Coward's glacial comedy

Quiz: Noël Coward or Murder, She Wrote?

She strides on in plaid tweeds, and shimmies around in a bespangled gilet. Under a sparkling hair-net, bright ginger plaits snake around her ears like headphones, a hair arrangement modelled on the woman who looked after the actress as a child. Burbling necromantic nonsense, she judders across the stage in an Egyptian sand dance, swoons into trance and gushes over ghosts that she can't see. Yet she also has hearty, bullying-off moments and flashes of beady-eyed shrewdness. She is part Brown Owl, part Barn Owl.

It is above all Angela Lansbury that people have come to see in Blithe Spirit. The 88-year-old actor, who has played mother to Elvis Presley, Laurence Harvey and Hamlet, who has starred in Gypsy and Sweeney Todd and been svelte and crisp as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, now takes on one of the stage's lovable gargoyles. Madame Arcati, the preposterous medium who claims to have had her first ectoplasmic manifestation when she was five and a half, is not actually the largest part in Noël Coward's 1941 comedy. Yet she – inhabited with benign splendour by Margaret Rutherford on screen – is the character everyone remembers. Lansbury gets a Broadway burst of applause whenever she arrives on the stage. She earns it. Not only for her rococo adornments but for something more central. Her Madame Arcati is not merely a dotty fraud but someone who believes in her own mystic powers. This is essential. For the grip of Michael Blakemore's remarkable production – one that grows in the course of the evening – is in showing how disturbing this glacial comedy can be.

Marvellous, they wrote: raptures greet Angela Lansbury's West End return

Matt Trueman — Wed, 19 Mar 2014 17:19:00 GMT

Murder, She Wrote star receives near-universal acclaim for her first theatrical appearance in London since 1975

Read Michael Billington's four-star review
Quiz yourself: Noël Coward or Murder, She Wrote?

You didn't need a mystic to see this one coming: Angela Lansbury's return to the British stage – for the first time since 1975, no less – in a West End production of Blithe Spirit has been greeted with near universal acclaim from critics.

"She is perfect," coos the Daily Mail. "In a different league," fawns the Express . "Very much alive," coughs Time Out. Mind you, on this occasion, the giddier critics seem to be utterly in line with public opinion. The 88-year-old Murder, She Wrote star has repeatedly drawn applause on her first entrance as the dotty medium Madame Arcati – a Broadway staple usually scoffed at by reserved British audiences. "She even gets a hand when she bumbles back off," according to Time Out's Andrzej Lukowski. "There are a lot of diehard Lansbury fans in the audience."

Blithe Spirit review: The play's the thing in a fine Noël Coward revival

Michael Billington — Tue, 18 Mar 2014 23:00:00 GMT

Gielgud, London
Angela Lansbury is back on a London stage after nearly 40 years, but her presence has a faintly distorting effect

Good as it is to see Angela Lansbury back on a London stage after nearly 40 years, her presence has a faintly distorting effect on an otherwise fine revival of Noël Coward's "improbable farce". It is Lansbury's image that dominates the posters and publicity, but Coward's 1941 play is not called Madame Arcati, nor is it about spiritualism. It is really about a subject that haunts all Coward's best comedies, which is the perils of long-term commitment.

Coward's hero, Charles Condomine, is a popular novelist who is famously spooked by his past. Married to the super-rational Ruth, his second marriage, he rashly holds a seance to research a thriller he is writing about a homicidal medium. But a jokey experiment causes marital mayhem when, with the aid of the hearty Arcati, he finds his first wife, Elvira, has suddenly materialised. What follows is a spectral variation on the eternal triangle, with Charles torn between two equally demanding women.

Blithe Spirit and theatre as seance: the lasting appeal of spiritualism on stage

Lyn Gardner — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 18:23:00 GMT

Channelling voices, raising the dead, audiences eager to believe … spiritualism makes great theatre. Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit is a comedy classic haunted by a host of spectres and showmen

In 1911, the famed American medium Anna Eva Fay held a public seance at the London Coliseum, inviting audience members to ask questions that she would answer by channelling the dead. Seated in the auditorium was Violet Coward, whose beloved 11-year-old son, Noël, had just begun his stage career after Violet spotted an advert in the Daily Mirror looking for a "talented boy" to appear in a play called The Goldfish.

Violet was ambitious for her child and the Coward finances were precarious, so Noël's debut was welcome. But had she done the right thing in putting him on the stage so young? Violet decided to ask the opinion of Fay and those in the afterlife. The answer was unequivocal: "Keep him where he is! He is a great talent and will have a wonderful career!"

This week's new theatre

Mark Cook & Lyn Gardner — Sat, 01 Mar 2014 06:00:00 GMT

A theatre great returns to the London stage after almost 40 years, though she is probably best known as a small-screen star. Switch on your TV at any time and you're likely to catch an episode of Murder, She Wrote starring Angela Lansbury. Now, at 88, she is reprising the role she originated on Broadway in 2009 – and earned her one of her five Tonys – as the scatty medium Madame Arcati in Michael Blakemore's production of the Nöel Coward classic Blithe Spirit. Lansbury was last here in 1975, playing Gertrude to Albert Finney's Hamlet at the National Theatre; which is coincidentally currently reviving Shelagh Delaney's A Taste Of Honey (to 11 May), in which Lansbury starred in New York in 1960.

Angela Lansbury admits Murder, She Wrote will always haunt her

Maev Kennedy — Thu, 23 Jan 2014 13:45:00 GMT

Actor returns to West End as scatty medium Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, reprising Broadway role that drew Jessica Fletcher fans

Angela Lansbury, an actor returning to the London stage with a mantelpiece full of awards and a glittering career on Broadway stretching back more than half a century, has ruefully admitted that she is doomed for ever and worldwide to be known as the star of the television series Murder, She Wrote.

The actor is returning to the West End in March after an absence of 40 years, in the bravura role for which older female actors give thanks to Noël Coward: the scatty medium Madame Arcati in his black comedy of a marriage haunted by a previous wife, Blithe Spirit.

Angela Lansbury set to end 40-year absence from the London stage

Matt Trueman — Fri, 29 Nov 2013 12:53:36 GMT

Murder She Wrote actor to reprise role of Madame Arcati in production of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit

Angela Lansbury will make her first appearance on the London stage for almost 40 years in a revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit.

Lansbury, 88, will resurrect her Broadway performance as the muddled medium Madame Arcati, for which she won best featured actress at the 2009 Tony Awards, in a West End production. Former National Theatre associate Michael Blakemore will return to the play to direct a British cast, with previews set to start at the Gielgud theatre in March.

Blithe Spirit – review

Mark Fisher — Mon, 04 Nov 2013 16:01:00 GMT

Perth theatre
Lurking behind Noël Coward's silly story of dead wives and seances is a more thoughtful play that we see too little of here

Ghosts, as we all know, are pallid creatures. Not so in this revival of Noël Coward's supernatural comedy. In contrast to the transparent drapes, pastel fittings and twinkling chandeliers of Kenny Miller's 1940s set, Sally Reid's deceased Elvira is a blood-red apparition whose fiery tresses and scarlet robes project the image of a woman with more pulse and passion, dead or not, than any of the delicate human beings she has returned to haunt.

At least, that's how it nearly works in Johnny McKnight's production. It would be easier to see Elvira as a life force from beyond the grave if the director hadn't relocated this most English of plays to a Perthshire village. Coward's very particular brand of humour depends on an emotional repression and, crucially, a restraint of expression that translates awkwardly from the home counties to upper-class Scotland. When subjected to the warm conversational delivery we get here, his clipped, performative language, with its heavy irony and aphoristic wit, is not as funny. Only Anne Lacey as the eccentric medium Madame Arcati consistently strikes the right note of brittle indifference. Everyone else is too human – although it's noticeable that the more intense the marital rows, the more convincing they sound.

This week's new theatre and dance

Mark Cook & Lyn Gardner — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 00:05:00 GMT

First seen at the Curve in Leicester last Christmas, Paul Kerryson's revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein's musical about a prim Victorian school teacher at the court of Siam is certainly a handsome affair. It's a production that shies away from confronting the show's doubtful politics and cultural stereotyping (foreigners are cute at best; savages at worst) and concentrates instead on the score and spectacle. There are some great numbers – including Getting To Know You, Shall We Dance, and I Whistle A Happy Tune – and plenty to look at; the court of Siam is full of Oriental opulence. It's an old-fashioned piece that shows its age but Kerryson throws everything at it and reaps the reward.

Blithe Spirit; The Tempest – review

Susannah Clapp — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 00:05:36 GMT

Apollo, London W1; Playhouse, Oxford

It should be the ultimate revival. Noël Coward's 1941 play about the return of the dead is resurrected by the director who has become the diva of the redivivus. Thea Sharrock, who last year breathed new life into Rattigan's After the Dance and last month staged an exquisite production of David Hare's Plenty, now takes on Blithe Spirit, in which a woman is summoned back from the Other Side to drive her widower and his new wife to distraction.

This is not a rescue from obscurity. The play has haunted the stage since its huge success during the second world war. Joanna Lumley, Maria Aitken and Twiggy have all played the ghost. Pinter directed it. Rupert Everett has been the spooked husband. Angela Lansbury, Penelope Keith and Marcia Warren have inhabited the role of Madame Arcati, the medium evoked with cock-eyed jollity by Margaret Rutherford in the 1945 movie.

Blithe Spirit – review

Michael Billington — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:59:34 GMT

Apollo, London

Coward's comedies are always bankable West End prospects. But Thea Sharrock's revival of this 1941 piece has lost some sheen since it was first seen at the Theatre Royal, Bath seven years ago. It would be an exaggeration to say it's only a ghost of its former self, but it has acquired a slightly routine quality and the new cast is much patchier than the first.

Fortunately, the play still fascinates for what it reveals about Coward himself: not least his suspicion of entangling personal commitments. His hero, Charles Condomine, is a novelist who finds himself haunted by his ghostly first wife, Elvira, and emotionally dominated by his second, Ruth. Marriage, in fact, is seen largely as a series of ratty exchanges in which couples gnaw away at past infidelities: even a makeweight couple, the Bradmans, who pop in periodically to provide ballast to the plot, scratch away at each other's failures. And as Charles, like so many Coward protagonists, finally escapes the domestic chaos, you feel he represents Coward's ideal of a life of work and travel unimpeded by demanding relationships.

Blithe Spirit | Theatre review

Lyn Gardner — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 22:30:01 GMT

Royal Exchange, Manchester

The hidden laughter of children suddenly gurgles from nowhere at the end of Sarah Frankcom's revival of Noël Coward's 1941 comedy. Minutes later, the Royal Exchange's in-the-round auditorium comes gloriously into its own as mayhem explodes in a climax that has all the energetic wildness of a malicious Halloween prank.

If Giles Croft's recent Nottingham Playhouse revival highlighted the Condomines' unpleasantness – smug, snug, middle class, and unaware of the coming storm of the second world war that will sweep their way of life aside – then Frankcom's is about the need to release, or be in touch with, your inner child. The marriage of writer Charles Condomine to his second wife, Ruth, is childless, sensible and devoid of passion, and its foundations are rocked by the arrival of the medium Madame Arcati and the materialisation of Charles's dead first wife, Elvira.