Product Description

I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war.' Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for three decades thereafter. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a spirit medium Madame Arcati (originally performed by Margaret Rutherford) Coward's play is an escapist comedy about a man whose two previous wives return to haunt him."A minor comic masterpiece of the lighter sort" Professor Allardyce Nicoll

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #302019 in Books
• Published on: 2002-06-20
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 130 pages

Customer Reviews

Don't bother looking for the subtext!
This well-loved frothy Coward comedy is subtitled by Coward "an improbable farce," with good reason. Truly a product of its time, this play now seems simultaneously frozen in time (in pre-war upper-middle class Kent, that is), yet strangely nostalgic. No surprise then that Blithe Spirit is undergoing a rapid revival with amateur dramatic companies up and down the country, whose audiences presumably lap it up with the same enthusiasm as they would a cream tea.

Coward's text retains a superficial glossy formality that suggests the reappearance of one's late wife in the company of one's current spouse is socially awkward and a trifle embarrassing but not just cause to lose your stiff upper lip.

Subtext? Forget it! Just slide down the verbal glissando interplay, then go home happy. Not a deep, meaningful or consequential work, but enjoyable nonetheless. Like your Chinese takeway, consume with pleasure, but expect to want another one in an hour's time!