Blithe Spirit is often revived, but with each new production there is also debate about why do it.David Cooper/Shaw festival/Handout/Supplied
- Title: Blithe Spirit
- Written by: Noël Coward
- Director: Mike Payette
- Actors: Damien Atkins, Julia Course, Deborah Hay and Donna Soares
- Company: Shaw Festival
- Venue: Festival Theatre
- City: Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ont.
- Year: Runs to Oct. 8, 2023
Great claims are made about Noël Coward’s barbed repartee. Critics have said his use of language as a domestic weapon foreshadows Harold Pinter and Joe Orton.
And of his regularly revived comedies, they have often identified Blithe Spirit as his masterpiece, a farce where a ridiculous plot about the awkward appearance of a dead wife at a séance hides a social drama of sexual jealousy and marital fatigue. If only these heights or depths were available to the Shaw Festival company as it revives Blithe Spirit with little ambition for anything but a few laughs.
Things begin sadly as novelist Charles Condomine (Damien Atkins) and his wife Ruth (Donna Soares) chat about the medium they have invited to dinner so the writer can gather material about occult practices for his new book. Atkins is dressed for dinner in a shiny harlequin-patterned suit more appropriate for a Vegas lounge act than an English socialite, and his stilted conversation with Soares feels merely expository. If we should already be aware of tensions in this marriage, it is only by parsing their phrases. Neither tone nor rhythm are doing the job.
Blithe Spirit is often revived – there was another movie version in 2020 – but with each new production there is also debate about why do it. Coward wrote it in England in 1941, during the London Blitz, somehow intuiting that a people at daily risk of being killed would happily escape into a comedy about death. So, on the one hand, it is a play about a topic of perennial concern.
From left, Jenny L. Wright as Mrs Bradman, Damien Atkins as Charles, Deborah Hay as Madame Arcati, Donna Soares as Ruth and David Adams as Dr Bradman in Blithe Spirit.David Cooper/Shaw festival/Handout/Supplied
On the other, as Ruth does battle with the sexy first wife the medium conjures from the dead, it is also a comedy that relies on the tired trope of wives being burdens men must suffer. The joke is that Charles is now stuck with two. Perhaps this is the problem with Soares’s brisk Ruth – that director Mike Payette may not have given her much instruction beyond insisting the character not be a shrew. It is a play with strong parts for women, so it can certainly use the rethink on casting and interpretation of these roles, but as it stands Payette’s direction lacks a clear mission.
Of course, Deborah Hay as the medium Madam Arcati is a riot. The role is a gift to any actor and Hay is a blithe spirit herself: Her ululations and gyrations, playing a doddering crone one minute and interpretive gymnast the next, are a delight to behold. There is also some reliable comedy from Katherine Gauthier as the harried maid Edith.
As Elvira, the first wife come back to haunt the second marriage, Julia Course is a suitably mischievous temptress. Still, she and Atkins, a performer more amiable than suave, never establish much sexual tension – which is, after all, the theatrical raison d’être for her supernatural presence. One exception is a scene where he eats a cucumber sandwich while she salivates. (Apparently ghosts can’t eat food.) The production could use many more moments like that one.
She appears in a watery green evening gown as designer James Lavoie begins colour-coding the characters: orange for the living, green for the dead and a pale blue for Charles, caught in the middle as he tries to pacify his living wife while flirting with a demanding ghost. Perhaps the device would be amusing rather than distracting if there were more going on beneath the flashy duds. As it is, the costume design feels like this show’s cleverest gesture.
In the interest of consistency across all critics’ reviews, The Globe has eliminated its star-rating system in film and theatre to align with coverage of music, books, visual arts and dance. Instead, works of excellence will be noted with a critic’s pick designation across all coverage. (Television reviews, typically based on an incomplete season, are exempt.)