When I reviewed Seattle Rep’s The Skin of Our Teeth, and mentioned I’d never attended any productions of it after fifty years of watching and writing about theatre, my editor wrote back that he was surprised I hadn’t seen it. Ditto, I hate to admit, with Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. I had read both but somehow never managed to get around to seeing either play produced on stage. In both cases, my loss!
Blithe Spirit is one of those plays that both British and America theatres produced in gobs—between them, there are probably thousands of light dinner comedies that basically serve a two-fold purpose: to get people’s minds off of the difficulties of modern life and to give them a breather from their own lives. (Even though they’re from about the same period, Bertolt Brecht abhorred this kind of play. In writing his works such as Mother Courage and Her Children or the Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, he wanted to wake up the audience to revolution. Tonight’s play raises some moral and even spiritual issues—but its main purpose is to entertain.)
And does it ever! The cast is a tight-knit ensemble that works very well together. One oft-seen problem with this kind of writing is that some of the roles can get out of balance with other roles. It’s the nature of the beast for this kind of work, but Allison Narver’s direction holds everyone together in a whole, coherent world. Some of Coward’s characters are more broadly drawn than others of course, but still, even with a spiritualist and one of these great idiotic maids in the cast, it did seem that they could reasonably be found in the same universe, or at least the same English village outside London.
Everyone works together as they face a silly situation: one husband has to deal with not one but two wives, one of whom has been accidentally recalled from the dead by a perhaps not entirely skilled medium. Further, some of the characters can’t see other characters, which means it might be possible to know where they were a few minutes ago but not necessarily where they are now.
The set (Casey Wong) and costumes (Cather Hunt) are beautiful—the set is the kind of dreamy space you’d expect an English novelist to live who’s been more than a little successful with his second wife, Ruth, the kind of thing Fred and Ginger used to dance in, only perhaps not quite so showy. It’s an old fashioned walled set that’s entirely, well, earth-bound as it were, contrasting well with the metaphysical actions, marked by mist and by Connie Yung’s lighting design when the dead get revived. (Cricket S Myers’s sound design is a little less successful—comprised mainly of recorded sound cues, it never seems quite in the same world as say, the ladies’ dresses or the furniture.)
The real glory of the play, of course, is Coward’s language. Unlike other light entertainment of the period, even the jokes are often quite beautiful, or at least elegant and usually very funny. It’s sometimes hard for some US actors to carry off that bright, artificial language (Hepburn could do it, for instance) that is much like a soufflé. You just can’t fuss with it too much or it will collapse on you. There was the occasional lost joke: I think that even though there had been previews, the play had not quite settled into the realities of a live audience, so some punchlines were lost to laughter, but then I suppose plays like these were intended for revisiting, not as scholarly texts but as an opportunity to bring other well dressed folks to the theatre for the newest hit in town.
That’s finally what Blithe Spirit was intended to be. It does a very fine job of hitting its marks.
Reviewer: Keith Dorwick