Blithe Spirit review: Scene-stealer Jennifer Saunders summons a spirited act

1/10

Jennifer Saunders is a surprising beacon of subtlety in this brash reading of Noel Coward’s Forties comedy. She’s the latest in a long line of comic greats to have a crack at Madame Arcati, the medium who presides over the resurrection of a writer’s ghostly first wife, to the understandable annoyance of his new spouse.

Arcati is a scene-stealing turn and Saunders attacks it with a repertoire of eccentric verbal and physical tricks and ticks. Her spiritualist is flatulent, caterpillar-eyebrowed and seems to have combed her hair with bacon fat. But Richard Eyre’s production maintains such a hysterical pitch from start to finish that her appearances feel like light relief.

Coward’s stylised writing has been so often spoofed it’s easy for actors to tip into glibness. Eyre, usually such a refined and delicate director, pushes his cast into pastiche. Geoffrey Streatfeild as writer Charles and Lisa Dillon as his second wife Ruth are hyperactively jittery and clipped from the get-go.

The séance they stage — as research for Charles’s new book — is excruciatingly awkward. It’s done with precision and panache, funny but exhausting to watch.

When dead Elvira appears, in the gauze-draped shape of Emma Naomi, the dynamic changes. Beneath the coded social niceties, this is a comedy about possessiveness and sexual jealousy. Naomi has the slinky poise of a Thirties bombshell but sounds oddly modern amid all the mannered twittering. Eyre’s production shows how loathsome the three main characters are, but the clownish tone means we skate over the viciousness other recent revivals have addressed. Coward’s privileged world is remote enough to feel strange now, but still too close for jokes about spousal abuse to pass unchecked.

The last major London revival of this play was stolen from its ostensible star Angela Lansbury, playing Arcati, by a then unknown Patsy Ferran as the maid Edith.

Rose Wardlaw does a great slapstick turn in the part here, bouncing around Anthony Ward’s set like a rubber ball. But this amusing, awkward production undoubtedly belongs to Saunders.

Until April 11 (0844 871 7623, thedukeofyorks.com)

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