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InsightsA Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare FestivalBlitheSpirit

The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah ShakespeareFestival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (inany production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and theinterpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately producedon the Festival’s stages.The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720.Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director.Copyright © 2011, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long asyou do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.For more information about Festival education programs:Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center StreetCedar City, Utah 84720435-586-7880www.bard.org.Cover photo: Arthur Hanket (left) as Charles, Stephanie Erb as Elvira, and Carole Healey as Ruth in Blithe Spirit, 2004

Blithe SpiritContentsInformation on the PlaySynopsis 4Characters 5About the Playwright 6Scholarly Articles on the PlayAn Improbable Farce 7Some Sort of Genius 9Noel Coward as the Mirror of a Generation 10Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-78803

Noel CowardNoel Pierce Coward was born on 16 December 1899. His family on his father’s side wasvery talented musically, and they helped nurture the natural virtuosity of the child, instilling inhim a lifelong love of music. Also, his mother took him to the theatre every year on his birthday,and, as he grew older, he found these junkets more and more fascinating and upon returninghome would rush to the piano and play by ear the songs from the production he had justseen.He made his first public appearance, singing and accompanying himself on the piano, ata concert held at Miss Willington’s School. Though obviously a very talented child, Coward’sprecocity did not carry over to his formal education. At best, his schooling was sporadic. Hewas indulged by his mother, who became the stereotypical stage mother during his early years,and it was at his mother’s insistence that he began attending Miss Janet Thomas’s DancingAcademy in addition to his regular school in London. Soon, Miss Thomas’s school usurpedthe position of importance held by traditional academic fare, and Coward became a child performer.Coward’s first professional engagement, and that which launched his long career, was on 27January 1911 in a children’s play, The Goldfish. After this appearance, he was sought after forchildren’s roles by other professional theatres. He was featured in several productions with SirCharles Hawtrey, a light comedian, whom Coward idolized and to whom he virtually apprenticedhimself until he was twenty. It was from Hawtrey that Coward learned comic acting techniquesand playwriting.At the tender age of twelve, Coward met one of the actresses who would help contributeto his overwhelming success, Gertrude Lawrence; she was then fifteen and a child performeras well. The acting team of Coward and Lawrence would become synonymous with polished,sophisticated comedy during the 1920s, ‘30s, and ‘40s.Coward began his writing career when he was sixteen by writing songs and selling themfor distribution. He turned his hand to playwriting when he was seventeen and found that hewas very good at writing dialogue. By 1919, his play I’ll Leave It to You was produced in theWest End with Coward in the leading role. One of the idiosyncrasies of Coward’s writing isthat often he wrote “whacking good parts” for himself or for people he knew. Some of his bestplays are essentially vehicles for his own talents or those of Gertrude Lawrence and later of theLunts. I’ll Leave It to You met with moderate success, and Coward received great praise fromcritics for his play-writing abilities.Coward went to New York for the first time in 1921 and arrived virtually penniless;however, although he may have begun the 1920s in penury, his position as the most popularplaywright in the English theatre became secure during this decade. In 1924, The Vortex,Coward’s most important serious play, was produced in London. The years from 1928 to 1934were regarded by many as Coward’s “golden years.” His string of successes include This Yearof Grace, Bitter Sweet, Private Lives, Cavalcade, Words and Music, Design for Living, andConversation Piece.In 1941 he wrote the record-breaking Blithe Spirit, which ran for 1,997 performances inLondon.After World War II, Coward fell from grace with many critics, who regarded him as beingpast his literary prime. However, by the late 1950s, audiences were once again in love with him.His plays, revues, and nightclub appearances were extremely successful. The critics, however,remained vitriolic, but their rancor failed to dim the enthusiasm of the general theatre-goingpublic, which clamored for more Coward plays.6Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880

On January 1, 1970, Coward was honored by the queen as a knight bachelor for servicesrendered to the arts. In the same year, he was awarded a special Tony Award by the Americantheatre for distinguished achievement in the theatre. In 1972, he received an honorary doctorof letters from the University of Sussex.Coward died of a heart attack in Jamaica on 26 March 1973, bringing to an end a career ofmore than sixty years in the theatre.Blithe Spirit:An Improbable FarceFrom Insights, 1992Noel Coward subtitled Blithe Spirit “an improbable farce,” and it is, not only because itasks the audience to believe in the supernatural but also because its humor turns on the ideathat the supernatural world has a pattern of manners much like ours.Suspending disbelief comes easily to audiences of this play. The playgoer knows fromthe opening moments, when the Condomines and Bradmans are so sure that ghosts cannotappear, that almost certainly something will happen to prove them wrong. Madame Arcati isa trustworthy link between “here” and “the other side”; she is so much more down-to-earth,for all of her clairvoyance and bizarre dress, than the rather superficial and over-sophisticatedCondomines. She rides a bicycle, likes to eat, openly shows enthusiasm, and speaks in GirlScout clichés. If such a woman believes in ghosts, it would be very hard for a self-respectingaudience not to play along. This belief is central to the play’s humor--the butts of the jokesoften are the foolish characters who refuse to believe in Elvira’s presence.Elvira is not merely a believable ghost, she is a ghost who pouts, teases, whines, manipulates--inshort, does exactly what she did when alive. Elvira has not mellowed at all in the afterlife,which she describes as an extended cocktail party where she played chess with GenghisKhan and watched Merlin do magic tricks. Her jealousy of Charles and Ruth drives her finallytoward murder in order to win him back. Yet there is not much to be feared from death (evenmurder) in this play. After all, life on the other side seems to be just like life here, only gray.Blithe Spirit is a farcical version of one of the staples of comedies of manners, the domesticdisagreement. The play hinges on the triangle--husband and loving wife separated by jealousformer wife (who happens to be dead). The playgoer wants them to triumph, to banish Elviraand return to bliss--or does he? After all, with her spontaneity and love of living, Elvira displaysconsiderable charm. Once Coward starts manipulating audience sympathy, it is a short step tocheering for the ghosts of Ruth and Elvira as they try to beat Charles in the final act.Much of what makes this play so charming, however, are the effects that cannot be seen onthe written page, but must be experienced on the stage. First are the stage tricks, such as thefloating bowl of flowers and the crashing crockery and pictures in the final scene. Additionally,there are some nice visual touches. Elvira is an ordinary fashionable, sophisticated woman,made ghostly by being gray from head to toe. When Ruth dies, the effect doubles; now thereare two gray matrons competing for attention. However, the principal difference between readingand seeing Blithe Spirit is in the comedic effect of overlapping simultaneous dialogue. Onthe page, the reader can follow only one speaker per line; on the stage, words are tennis ballsUtah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-78807

eing flung from person to person, tossed above heads and below belts.In fact, most of the humor in Blithe Spirit turns on the question, who knows the most? Theaudience and the Condomines begin on the same level, educated and worldly and convinced thatall this spiritual business is nonsense. Then the level of awareness shifts, with the audience andCharles joining Madame Arcati in knowing that ghosts exist, and Ruth’s skepticism now makesher the foolish one. Then there is another shift--Charles and Ruth know about Elvira and attemptto conceal their knowledge from the Bradmans. Toward the end, Charles, Ruth, Elvira, and theaudience know even more than Madame Arcati about ghosts and their behavior. These changinglevels of awareness keep the farce from falling flat after the first scene or two of miscommunicationbetween the real world and the other side; nobody, especially the playgoer, can be quite sure ofwhat he knows.Blithe Spirit:Some Sort of GeniusBy Susan E. Gunter8Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880

From Souvenir Program, 1992In his autobiography, Future Indefinite, Noel Coward says that he completed Blithe Spiritin six days: “When the right note is struck and the structure of a play is carefully built inadvance, it is both wise and profitable to start at the beginning and write through to the endin as short a time as possible.” Coward had indeed struck the right note. Blithe Spirit openedon July 2, 1941, in the Piccadilly Theatre in London and became an instant and overwhelmingsuccess. The play ran for a record-setting four and one-half years (1,997 performances). Perhapsthe play represented Coward’s gift to a war-weary nation. On opening night the audiencewalked across planks laid over the debris from a recent air raid to enter the fanciful ghost-riddenworld that Coward had created, a world he himself said was “on a plane just above reality.”Blithe Spirit opens with a mature, sophisticated married couple, Charles and RuthCondomine, who live rational and orderly lives in the English countryside near Kent. WriterCharles, who is beginning a new novel called The Unseen (one of the play’s many small ironies),has asked medium Madame Arcati to come to their home and conduct a séance as partof his “research” for the book. Madame Arcati, a delightful character who goes everywhereon her bicycle and has most recently written a children’s book featuring a moss beetle as hero,challenges all of the Condomines’ rational assumptions concerning reality in a drawing roomcomedy of the highest order.Madame Arcati, using as her control a child named Daphne, proceeds in her séance to callup the ghost (“protoplasmic manifestation”) of Charles’s first wife, Elvira, who has been deadfor seven years. As the gramophone plays the tune, “Always,” the table bangs about, MadameArcati screams and falls from her stool, and Charles hears a ghostly voice.Elvira, whose flamboyant and irreverent personality contrasts markedly with Ruth’s sensible,efficient nature, can be seen and heard by Charles but no one else. Much of the play’s subsequentwry humor turns on the device of double meanings: Charles’s remarks to the ghostlyElvira are heard and misunderstood by Ruth, providing in effect a dramatic and exaggeratedillustration of how married couples often fail to communicate to one another. Ruth, at firstskeptical of Elvira’s “reality,” seeks formulaic explanations for Charles’s odd behavior, attributinghis strange remarks to too much alcohol or a nervous breakdown.Elvira’s blithe attitude counterpoints Ruth’s stolidness, and even Madame Arcati, who whencalled back to the house later refuses to try to recall Elvira because she has just eaten pigeon pieand cucumber sandwiches for lunch, tells Ruth that, “there are more things in heaven and earththan are dreamt of in your philosophy, Mrs. Condomine.”As Elvira’s “blithe spirit” turns bad, however, the audience must be willing to suspenddisbelief and accept the play’s ghostly conventions. Elvira upsets the balance that Charles andRuth have created in their relationship, making them realize that their rules of conduct do notapply in the larger context of the unexplainable mysteries of life and death, as Coward’s farcicalplotting and witty dialogue combine to produce a technically skillful play that has entertainedaudiences for over four decades.Blithe Spirit:Noel Coward as the Mirror of aGenerationBy Lynnette L. HornerUtah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-78809

From Insights, 2004“I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift than enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five daysduring one of the darkest years of the war” (Noël Coward, quoted at Methuen, “Blithe Spirit by NoëlCoward,” http://www.methuen.co.uk/blithespirit.html (accessed 8 April 2004). Written and produced inthe thick of World War II in 1941, one might ask the question, what was there about that time and placethat would inspire the creation of one of the most popular and long-running comedies; “an improbablefarce in three acts”? What chord did it strike in audiences that were for the second time living throughthe dreariness of black outs, air raids, rationing, and the heartbreaking casualty lists caused by war foughton home soil?A look back to the author’s beginnings may give us some insight. Noël Coward was born inDecember 1899, and thus, was in the interesting position of growing up with a new century. Born tomiddle class parents of no small musical talent, Coward was weaned on amateur and professional theatricalproductions. His father, a piano salesman, was very good at musical improvisation, and Coward followedin his father’s footsteps. Nurtured in this atmosphere, he was in constant demand to perform, first,on his home turf and then in amateur productions. An avid observer of people, Coward developed thetalent of picking up the eccentric nuances in people that made interesting characters who translated wellto the stage and screen. And whereas some of his contemporaries dramatized the deep and hard aspects oflife evolving through the industrial age, he chose to orbit in social circles that were the epitome of glamour,many times frivolous with a tinge of cynicism. In large measure, Coward’s life, experience, and careermirrored the birth of a century and the growing pains of a generation.At the tender age of ten, Coward convinced his mother to answer an advertisement announcing theaudition for young boys to be part of a prestigious children’s theatrical group. Of the hundreds of letterssubmitted, there was something in Noël’s mother’s letter that piqued interest, and Noël was invitedto audition. His natural charm and stage presence was apparent and his young feet were firmly plantedon his life’s course as he joined his new theatre family. During this time, he made friends with a youngGertrude Lawrence who became a lifetime co-star and dear friend. He also befriended another youngactress, Esme Wynne, who later became a successful novelist and inspired Noël to add writing to his listof talents.As a young eighteen-year-old, drunk with his success on the stage and full of high, youthful ambitions,Noël had not felt much impact from World War I. But, in 1918, he was called up and, althoughfound physically unfit for active service, was assigned to serve nine months in the Artists Rifles. He wasmiserable with this interruption in his career. By the time he entered the war, England was well past theglamour of patriotism and was tired of the rationing, black outs, and general misery the war brought totheir shores.In some measure, it was a response of escapism from the weariness of war that inspired the spectacleproductions that were spun sugar, superficial and with a dash of cynicism that characterized the 1920sera. Coward was in the thick of it and whether he simply mirrored social mores of the time, or as somecriticized, created them, his plays during the twenties were considered sometimes immoral and shocking.They were wildly popular. A commentary of the opening night of The Vortex on his twenty-sixth birthdayacknowledges the “which came first” argument of whether art imitates life or vice verse.“Noël’s first nights had already attained fever-pitch of excitement they were never to lose. Celebritiespredominated: film and stage stars, usually one or two members of the Royal family, and socialitesgalore with their concomitant Rolls Royces, furs and jewels. They were beginning to talk a language oftheir own: St. John Ervine had already complained at having to sit next to a litter of them with their‘too divine’ and ‘simply marvelous darlings’. Whether the bright young things were trying to copy Noël’scharacters, who Mrs. Patrick Campbell said ‘talked like typewriting’, or whether Noël was holding up themirror to the socialites is not easy to decide, but one may suspect that it was the former” (Cole Lesley,10Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880

Graham Payn, and Sheridan Morely, Noël Coward and His Friends [New York: William Morrowand Company, Inc., 1979], 58).Fast forward through the thirties during which time, Coward continued acting, producing, writing,and singing on both sides of the Atlantic. To America he brought his signature brand of sophisticatedcomedy. The United States repaid the favor by infusing his work with pacing and energy, notcommon before in British theatre.Coward’s maturity is also apparent in his political interest and involvement in the historicalevents leading to World War II. In stark contrast from his eighteen-year-old annoyance at World WarI interrupting his otherwise idyllic lifestyle, Coward was a passionate vocal opponent of the policyof appeasement that led to World War II. His desire was to take an active, significant role duringthe war, and for a short time worked for British propaganda in Paris. He had hoped this would leadto an official war job working with the Navy. Because of Coward’s high profile persona, WinstonChurchill was opposed to it. It was decided the greatest part he could play would be to entertain thetroops and spent many of the war years spanning the globe, to Africa, Europe, and India (Lesley, 132133).In 1941, Britain was again war weary and the toll of death and loss touched every level of society.The spiritualist movement (the belief that the dead can communicate with the living througha medium) had crossed the Atlantic from America and had had four decades to line up its believersand debunkers. Coward, ever in tune with societal undercurrents, spun a tale in Blithe Spirit that isan escape from the horror of war, yet deals with its most terrible cost, death, with a light hand. Hedeftly wove this with a poke at cynicism and the subliminal suggestion of “be careful what you askfor.”Noël Coward’s public responded and, “Blithe Spirit remained the longest running comedy inBritish theatre for three decades” (Methuen). The irresistible combination of urbane humor, intriguingcharacters, and enough surprise to keep things interesting still delights as Blithe Spirit continuesto delight today’s audiences as it did half a century ago.Utah Shakespeare Festival351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-788011