Reviews 2015
Reviews 2015
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by Noel Coward, directed by Michael Blakemore
David Mirvish, Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto
February 11-March 15, 2015
Madame Arcati: “‘There are more things in heaven and earth ....’”
For most people the chance to see Dame Angela Lansbury on stage will be the greatest draw to see the touring production of Blithe Spirit now at the Princess of Wales Theatre until March 15. Lansbury is absolutely wonderful. At age 89, Lansbury, spry, quick-witted and able to command the stage, gives a more nuanced performance of the role of Madame Arcati than I have ever seen before. But this Blithe Spirit is no star vehicle. Instead, director Michael Blakemore has read the text more closely than other directors and has drawn excellent performances from the entire cast. You may come to see Angela Lansbury but you will leave having seen an extraordinarily fine production of the play. In fact, this insightful production has now become the best Blithe Spirit of the many I have seen and sets the benchmark for any future productions.
Noel Coward subtitled Blithe Spirit (1941) “an improbable farce” because of its use of the supernatural. Yet the key aspect of the play that most directors get wrong is that the characters in a farce do not see their own situation as funny. For them it is distressing and deadly serious and the more seriously they take it, the funnier it is. Where most directors go wrong in Blithe Spirit is with the character of the medium, Madame Arcati. The novelist Charles Condomine (Charles Edwards) has invited Madame Arcati for dinner followed by a seance. He assumes she is a charlatan and he is interested in observing the tricks of the trade for a novel he is writing about a homicidal medium. Yet, the joke is on him since Madame Arcati is not a charlatan but the genuine article.
Recent productions of the play, such as Stratford’s in 2013 and Soulpepper’s in 2007, have gone wrong precisely for failing to understand this simple point. Though everyone in the play calls Madame Arcati “dotty” or a “lunatic”, she is no such thing. Madame Arcati is a professional and takes her calling seriously. No matter how improbable the things may be that she discusses, they all come true. Much of the humour of the play demands non-believers such as Charles and his second wife Ruth (Charlotte Parry) coming round to accept fantastic notions which to Madame Arcati are commonplace givens.
Most productions present Madame Arcati as a loony eccentric who happens to call up the spirit of Charles’s first wife Elvira (Jemima Rooper) by accident. Yet that is contrary to the text. Arcati knew she has conjured up something in her seance and the ghost of Elvira is proof that she did. Blakemore’s close reading makes Arcati a more fully rounded character than usual and the play itself as fascinating as it is funny.
Arcati’s warm-up dance for entering a trance is hilarious – like an animated ancient Egyptian mural interspersed with odd come-hither poses – but Lansbury’s Arcati gives the impression that she will do whatever is necessary to get her job done properly. At the end, after have explained earlier that she can’t banish ghosts, Lansbury’s Arcati gives Charles a knowing look, I’ve never seen in any previous Arcati, when she advises him to move out of the house. When the raucous finale begins we realize that Arcati knew exactly what she had done and was hinting to Charles about what the consequences would be.
Twice in the play Coward has Arcati quote Hamlet’s line: “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, / Than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Blakemore has had the great insight to realize that that is the point of the play. The worldview of the old women everyone else thinks is mad is actually the only one that explains and predicts the events that the others experience. By taking Madame Arcati seriously, Blakemore reveals greater depths in the play than anyone has before.
Blakemore also has a more complex view of Charles. In most productions, Charles, after having got used to the shock of seeing his dead wife again, treats her presence as an annoyance. Here, Blakemore has Charles Edwards suggest through smiles and an increasing playful attitude toward Elvira that Charles Condomine is beginning to enjoy the unusual situation of having two wives and wishes Ruth would get used to it. This attitude is far more in line with Coward’s other plays that explore unusual relationships, especially with Design for Living (1933) which concludes with a happy threesome of two men and one woman. Here we have two women and one man, although there is no same sex attraction here to complete the triangle as in the earlier play.
Edwards is probably best known to North American audiences for his role in Downton Abbey as Michael Gregson, Lady Edith’s lover who goes missing in Germany. That role, however, gives no hint of how expert he is in comedy. His use of pauses or coughs to emphasize a significant word brings out the wit in lines that often are passed over. His timing is perfect, and he is masterful in detailing Charles’s ever increasing frustration when Ruth fails to believe him
Charlotte Parry and Jemima Rooper are well paired as Charles’s two wives. Where Parry makes Ruth uptight and brittle, Rooper makes Elvira voluptuous and childish. Both are expert at using tone of voice to bring out the humour in their lines. It is with deliberate irony that Blakemore emphasizes physical humour in the ghostly Elvira and verbal humour in the living Ruth.
Simon Jones makes an appropriately stolid Dr. Bradman. Sandra Shipley finds more humour in Mrs. Bradman than I’ve ever seen before. Blakemore has Lansbury’s Arcati immediately suss out the Bradman’s as disbelievers. Dr. Bradman senses nothing, but Mrs. Bradman does, and, being kindly but too conventional, the more she attempts to ingratiate herself with Arcati the more miserably she fails.
Most director ignore what is special about Edith the maid until the final scene. Blakemore, however, prepares us for the ending from Edith’s very first scene where she is blankly staring out the French windows into the garden whence ghosts will later make their entrances. The text emphasizes Edith’s habit of rushing about, but Blakemore gives her the added trait of always seeming distrait, as if her mind were elsewhere. Whenever anyone gives her an order she startles as if called out of the clouds. Susan Louise O’Connor fulfills Blakemore more complex vision of the character to perfection.
It would be a pleasure to Angela Lansbury on stage in any play. To see her give new life to a classic role is a joy. To see her in a great production of a classic play is joy unbounded.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photos: Sandra Shipley, Charles Edwards, Susan Louise O’Connor, Angela Lansbury, Charlotte Parry and Simon Jones; Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati; Charles Edwards, Jemima Rooper and Charlotte Parry. ©2014 Joan Marcus.
For tickets, visit www.youngpeoplestheatre.ca.
2015-02-13
Blithe Spirit