“BLITHE SPIRIT”

Waikato Times, Volume 129, Issue 21549, 11 October 1941, Page 11

“BLITHE SPIRIT”

NOEL COWARD’S NEW PLAY HEARTRLESS AND WORTHLESS Of the production of Noel Coward’s new play, ‘•Blithe Spirit,” the London correspondent of the Christian Science Monitor says:— On account of its author’s standing in the roll of contemporary dramatists, and also because there is a .reluctance to present expensive new productions in London at the present moment, “Blithe Spirit” is the most notable event that has happened in the British theatre since the beginning of the war. Let me make clear what it is about. Charles Condomine (Cecil Parker) is a novelist who, in search of data for his forthcoming book, invites to his house a spiritualistic medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford). There is a seance, at which Condomine’s first wife materialises, and cannot be got rid of. This produces many complications of a farcical nature, at the end of which the ghost of the first wife, Elvira (Kay Hammond), kills the second, Ruth (Fay Compton), in a motor smash. Condomine is then haunted by two wives, until both are exorcised, and he is left rejoicing to himself a widower twice over. Astonishing Technical Skill This play is constructed with astonishing technical skill. Condomine's last speech, with its accompaniment of falling pictures and broken crockery, is amazingly adroit. The acting and production are brilliant. Miss Rutherford’s Madame Arcati is full of school-girlish glee, and displays an athletic energy I had never suspected in her. Mr Parker’s suave portrait of a man who is apparently alert, witty, and self-confident, but who in reality has about as much capacity for grappling with the problems of life as a beetle has with a tank, is polished to the last gleam and glitter. Fay Compton has not really much of a part, and Kay Hammond can strike only one note, but she strikes it hard, true, and often. Moreover, there are in the play some jokes

about the Times newspaper, Budleigh Salterton, and the 8.8.C.’s musical programmes which are worth going a long way, waiting a long time, and enduring a great deal to hear.

All this does not alter the fact that, the play is heartless, shallow, and worthless. “Unparalleled Callousness

On the issues raised by. the very complicated problems produced by the situation with which he starts his play, Mr Coward has nothing whatever to say. If he had felt impel'L,’ by an inner compulsion to a play about life after death, I should probably have thought him unwise, because of the necessary limitations of the stage. But it would have been a compulsion that one could respect. Mr Coward has, however, no such compulsion. He is anxious only to make a joke, and, in order to do so, he makes his characters behave with a callousness unparalleled in my play-going experience.