“BLITHE SPIRIT”

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23716, 14 August 1942, Page 3

“BLITHE SPIRIT”

REPERTORY THEATRE’S PLAY

The Canterbury Repertory Theatre Society’s new presentation, Noel Coward’s three-act play, “Blithe Spirit,” proved an outstanding success when it began a season of three nights at the Radiant Hall last evening. The house was full, and it can safely be said that there was not a dull moment from the time the curtain rose on the domestic bickering of the first scene till it fell on the cynical comedy of the last. The play is being presented to raise funds for the Mayoress’ Christmas Parcels Fund and the British Seamen’s Society, and if its success last evening is a guide it should run to full houses this evening and to-morrow evening. Certainly few more enjoyable comedies have been presented by the society. With Miss Ngaio Marsh as producer, members of the cast have achieved a polished performance which moves with great liveliness from beginning to end. The play is about a novelist whose first wife has been dead seven years—she died of a heart attack brought on by a fit of laughter into which she fell while listening during her convalescence after pneumonia to a 8.8.C. musical programme—and whose second wife is curious about the first. The novelist wants to learn the jargon for a seance he proposes to describe in a book, and so asks a medium to dine and spend the evening. She arranges a seance and the novelist’s first_ wife materialises to him, but remains invisible to others on the stage. The novelist has from now on to contend with two wives, a material and most irritated one, and an insubstantial but very demanding one. There are many surprising developments before, with the help of the medium, the novelist is set free of his worries.

Miss Nonie Enright plays the medium with great enthusiasm and energy: Miss Margaret Brinkman, as the present wife, and Mrs Mavis Reesby. as the first wife, and Mr Guy Cbtterill as the novelist, fill demanding roles, and they succeed in keeping the c action admirablv brisk. Miss Helen Butler. Miss Mollv Dailey, and Mr Charles Hobbs also help to make the play the success it is. , , ... Interval music was played by Miss Bessie Pollard’s string ensemble.