Blithe Spirit

Jennifer Saunders is one of the UK’s most popular comic actresses. Her gleefully funny performance as the eccentric clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, delighted both critics and audiences alike when the production opened in Theatre Royal Bath’s 2019 Summer Season. With a distinguished creative team who have won a plethora of awards between them, this is a Blithe Spirt full of sparkling and spirit-lifting hijinks.

Novelist Charles Condomine and his second wife Ruth are literally haunted by a past relationship when an eccentric medium – Madame Arcati - inadvertently conjures up the ghost of his first wife, Elvira, at a séance. When she appears, visible only to Charles, and determined to sabotage his current marriage, life – and the afterlife – get complicated. Jennifer Saunders is much loved for the sketch show French and Saunders, for which she and Dawn French received a BAFTA fellowship in 2009, and for the hit comedy series and subsequent film, Absolutely Fabulous, which she both starred in and wrote.

Lisa Dillon (Ruth) is best known for her role as Mary Smith in BBC 1’s Cranford. Geoffrey Streatfeild’s credits include Spooks, The Thick of It, Traitors and the Histories Cycle at the RSC.

Richard Eyre, director of the National Theatre for ten years, is the winner of five Olivier Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. Designer Anthony Ward’s numerous productions include Tony Award winning Mary Stuart and Olivier Award winning Oklahoma!

We all wish we could conjure up someone from the dead. Even if we could, it’d be pretty difficult to reunite with the certain person you dream of having one more conversation. So when a medium brings up an unexpected guest at a polite dinner party, things are going to get tricky. Make sure you’ve got your place around the dinner table.

Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit play starts off with novelist Charles Condomine. Struggling for creative ideas for his latest big hit, he invites Madame Arcati around for a dinner with him and his second wife, Ruth. During the dinner, Arcati manages to make contact with the dead, which seems great at first. The seance has worked! That’s until Charles realises it’s his first wife, Elvira. Life for those in Blithe Spirit is going to change forevermore, but what can Arcati do?

No Blithe Spirit London play is complete without a star as Madame Arcati. Thankfully, we’re treated to luxury casting, with BAFTA-winning Jennifer Saunders as the spiritualist. There’s a top creative team too, including the five-time Olivier Award-winning director Richard Eyre and illusions by Paul Kieve that suspend all notions of reality. You can escape the real world for a few hours with a trip to theatre to see Blithe Spirit in London.

What to Watch For

• When the Blithe Spirit play first opened in London, West End audiences couldn’t get enough. Blithe Spirit began performances in 1941, and ran for 1,997 performances. By today’s standards, it’d be one of the longest-running shows.
• This production of Blithe Spirit began as a touring production, which opened at Theatre Royal Bath. Other Theatre Royal Bath shows to come to London include Oleanna and The Man in the White Suit.
• Did you know that High Spirits is a musical adaptation of Blithe Spirit? High Spirits ran in the West End in 1964, and put Arcati as the lead role. Noël Coward loved the stage show!