Blithe Spirit

The smash comedy hit of the London and Broadway stages, this much-revived classic from the playwright of Private Lives offers up fussy, cantankerous novelist Charles Condomine, re-married but haunted (literally) by the ghost of his late first wife, the clever and insistent Elvira who is called up by a visiting “happy medium”, one Madame Arcati. As the (worldly and un-) personalities clash, Charles’ current wife Ruth is accidentally killed, “passes over”, joins Elvira and the two “blithe spirits” haunt the hapless Charles into perpetuity.

Blithe Spirit is a comic play written by Noël Coward which takes its title from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “To a Skylark” (“Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert”). The play concerns socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, following the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles’s marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.