Mr. Coward's new play | 1940-1949

Mr. Noel Coward has labelled his "Blithe Spirit," which received its first performance at the Manchester Opera House last night, "an improbable farce in three acts." If it did nothing else it would mightily extend the ideas of those who suppose that farce must be always a matter of dodging in and out of bedrooms. After an opening that just slightly hangs fire, it provide nearly three hours of extremely diverting stagecraft and dialogue, punctuated by surprises which are often so completely unexpected and yet so completely logical that one has all the satisfaction which arises from following a thoroughly well-constructed "thriller." Since surprises should not be spoiled for those who ought to come to them freshly, one had hoped to get through this notice without revealing the basis for them. It cannot be done. Mr. Coward has put some of his cards on the table by the remarkable example of meiosis, which labels his farce as "improbable"; the critic must turn over one or two more by plainly indicating that by the time the third act is reached Mr. Coward has contrived, with all the remorseless efficiency of displayed cause and effect, to get two able-bodied ghosts on the stage. How he is to get them off again with any satisfaction to sense or sentiment becomes a problem of genuine and engrossing interest.

One is a little sorry to have to say that in the last scene of all the solution to this most amusing and brilliantly contrived problem turns out to be no more than "Fumed Oak" over again; the two newly embodied spirits are the wives of a gentleman who finds himself heartily and even maliciously glad to be rid of both of them. "Enfin seul!" is evidently Mr. Coward's grand solution for the male's matrimonial adventure; "shouting out the battle-cry of `Freedom!'" both suburban clerk and (here) successful novelist strike out, untrammelled, for the masculine wilderness. As the first ghost-wife (Miss Kay Hammond) was a definitely engaging minx and the second (Miss Fay Compton) noble in mien and rather humanly appealing in action the solution seems a little ungrateful. The novelist at one stage declines to be psycho-analysed on the ground that he sees no reason why he should be "most expensively humiliated for months merely in order to learn that at the age of four I was in love with my rocking-horse." Perhaps there was a rocking-horse in Mr. Coward's nursery to account for his often ungallant attitude towards wives, and even women, in general.

The play is brilliantly acted, and perhaps Miss Margaret Rutherford's breathless Madame Arcati - the spiritualist medium whose experiment launches the whole astonishing tangle - was the highest light of all. Mr. Coward uses the psychical research technique - the ectoplasm, the trance, the poltergeist, and all the rest most adroitly. And there are moments when this very unusual farce trembles on the edge of accomplished tragedy - as when the minx-ghost suddenly realises how her plans have miscarried and what she has done to the then living wife. An odd mixture and not untouched by genius of a sort.

G.P.

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