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The Theatreguide.London Review
Blithe
Spirit
Duke Of
York's Theatre Spring 2020; Harold Pinter
Theatre Autumn 2021
A man whose first wife died
is happily remarried when the ghost of Wife #1 appears. Only he and we can
see her, and she has mischief in mind.
Noel Coward's comedy is a
very funny play, and if performed with any sense of comic style, can be a
total delight. Even an uninspired low-energy production like this one
can't completely ruin it, and if you go in with low expectations and no
sense of what's missing, you might have a mildly enjoyable evening.
It used to seem sometimes
that there were two directors named Peter Hall. The one who directed
classics for the RSC and National Theatre was brilliant, but when he did
just-for-the-bucks commercial work all inspiration waned.
I wonder if there are
beginning to be two Richard Eyres. What's missing from this Blithe Spirit
is exactly the firm and inventive directorial hand we would expect from
Eyre, guiding the cast to the play's full comic potential.
Instead, with a couple of
partial exceptions, we get what feels like an early-rehearsal-period
run-through satisfied with getting the words right and not bumping into
the furniture.
This revival is being
marketed on the name of Jennifer Saunders, playing the mad medium whose
séance inadvertently raises the ghost. Madame Arcati is one of those
extended cameo roles that give an actor the opportunity to steal a show by
being uninhibitedly hammy (Think of Malvolio or Lady Bracknell).
She even gets a scene, as she
charges herself up to go into her trance, where the stage direction might
as well read 'She does some weird and funny stuff.'
But Saunders, who seems to
have been left on her own by the director to find both the character and
the shtick, comes up with nothing and just walks through the part.
Something similar seems to
have happened to Emma Naomi's ghost. It is absolutely essential to the
play that Elvira be irresistibly beautiful, sexy, intelligent and naughty.
These are qualities the right actress might naturally bring to the role or
that even a miscast actress could be guided to feign effectively.
Emma Naomi doesn't allure or
flirt or beguile or pout or flash with sexual danger. She is so hardly
even there that I found myself being distracted by the fear that her very
fake-looking wig was slipping off.
I want to make it clear that
I am not criticising the actors here, but the director. When more than one
actor in a production is bad, and they are bad in the same way, they were
either miscast or misdirected, told to do the wrong things or left to
flounder about trying to find the right things without guidance.
You can particularly see this
because others in this cast did find find a character and a comic tone to
play.
Acting honours here go to
Lisa Dillon in the usually thankless role of the second wife. Ruth is
essentially the straight man throughout the play, the target of Elvira's
pranks and insults and with little to do but react to everybody else's
wit.
But Dillon, clearly on her
own, sees that reaction can be funny, and that the line responding to what
was supposed to be the laugh-getter can get an even bigger laugh. It is
she, rather than Elvira or the shared husband or even Madame Arcati, who
will hold your attention in every scene.
As with almost all of Noel
Coward's plays, any man playing the lead has to compete with memories or
myths of the playwright's own voice and manner in the role.
Geoffrey Streatfeild is not
an instinctive comic, and you will start the evening missing the sense of
laid-back high style the play seems to want.
But he does gradually introduce an attractive alternate characterisation as Charles gets over his immediate shock and begins to warm to the idea of astral bigamy with a mix of boy's-own-adventure excitement and genteel lechery.
Gerald Berkowitz
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