Theatre in Review: Blithe Spirit (Shubert Theatre)

	Rupert Everett and Jayne Atkinson. Photo by Robert J. Saferstein.

Noel Coward subtitled Blithe Spirit "an improbable farce," but, really, there's nothing improbable about it -- it's a sturdily constructed piece of malicious hilarity that miraculously retains its freshness after six decades. Like most of Coward's works, however, it is notoriously vulnerable to directors and actors whose work is less than pitch-perfect. It's our great good luck that Michael Blakemore's production is infused with high spirits, featuring a cast of actors who are precisely attuned to Coward's mordant, martini-dry commentary on relations between the sexes, as practiced on both sides of the grave.

First among equals is Angela Lansbury, as Madame Arcati, the medium, who accidentally scares up a most unwanted ghost during a country-house séance. Lansbury has specialized in eccentrics throughout her long career, and here she puts to use everything she has ever learned, gleefully stealing scene after scene. From the moment she appears, sporting a wig the color of a mercurochrome stain, her hair woven into earmuffs lifted from Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, dressed in a bizarrely layered outfit that looks like a Constructivist painting, she is a most convincing ambassador from the astral plane.

However, there's nothing airy or spiritual about her; she has the weary air of someone who, long ago, found humanity to be a vast disappointment and sees no reason to change her opinion now. When a guest at the séance apologizes for a flippant remark, her response is as swift and chilling as Queen Victoria removing a treacherous minister of state. During a particularly difficult tea-time confrontation, she stops nibbling on cucumber sandwiches to raise her voice in the sternest protest, investing a relatively mild line ("Oh, Mrs. Condomine, I do resent your tone") with the sound of rolling tumbrels and falling guillotines.

On the other hand, she approaches the spiritual world with a bracingly matter-of-fact manner, remarking on her spirit guide's nasal problems, pointing out how India tea "upsets my vibrations," and trilling "Heigh-ho, heigh-ho, it's off to work we go" before contacting the spirit world with a dance -- an indescribable amalgam of bizarre gestures cribbed from Diaghilev, Isadora Duncan, and Salome. Later, when she comes in contact with her first real ghost, she sniffs the air for ectoplasm, then gushes like an adolescent girl meeting the matinee idol of her dreams. At 83, she's just about the blithest thing on any New York stage; the sight of her with a garland of garlic bulbs hanging on her arm as she trembles with ecstatic electricity is beyond my powers to render in words; it simply has to be seen to be believed.

Rupert Everett is something of a Coward specialist, having had early-career successes with The Vortex and Private Lives, and he'svvirtually ideal as Charles Condomine, the crime novelist who invites Madame Arcati into his drawing room for research purposes and, for his sins, gets his first wife back from the grave. Everett's descent from grandly sardonic man-of-the-manor to gibbering wreck (he alone can see Elvira, the departed spouse) is as neat a piece of farce acting now available. One minute he's smoothly dispensing cocktails and clever remarks; the next, he's curled up on the couch like a schoolboy sentenced to permanent detention. He buckles most amusingly under the stress of talking to two wives at once, only one of whom can hear the other; he also captures Charles' narcissistic side, as he gets rather comfy with this new take on the eternal triangle, munching on scones with maddening self-satisfaction and trying to explain why this new arrangement right be rather fun for all involved.

Nearly as adept is Christine Ebersole as Elvira, Charles' late first wife, who is most annoyed at being called back, but who quickly decides that, as long as she's here, she may as well make the maximum amount of mischief. Wrapped in an elegant white peignoir -- it could pass for a haute-couture shroud -- she sinks lazily into a chair, oozing unkindness and contentment in equal measure. When asked to carry a vase around the room -- Charles is trying to prove her existence -- she executes the task with laugh-provoking hauteur. (Ebersole also provides some exquisitely airy renditions of "Someday I'll Find You," "Always," "Something Very Strange," and other thematically related songs during the scene changes.) Jayne Atkinson is, in every way, her opposite number as Ruth, Charles' current wife, whose comfortable existence is undermined by the presence of Elvira. Atkinson's attempts to parse this impossible situation with English common sense slip quickly and riotously into hysteria; she also has a great blood-curdling scream when she realizes that she and Charles really are not alone.

Everything in Blakemore's production is stylish, although, at the performance I attended, a week after the opening, there was a slightly tentative quality to the performance, including a half dozen or so fluffed lines among all the principals. (At times, you wonder if Lansbury is making up some of her dialogue, but it's so gloriously right, you can't complain.) Still, this is production that you can curl up with. Peter J. Davison's drawing room, complete with piano, towering French windows, and a curving staircase in the distance, is as deluxe as anyone could possibly want. Brian MacDevitt provides a number of alluring late-afternoon looks, as well as some stunning morning sunshine, and a variety of effects that signify passages between this world and the next. The séance, lit apparently only by a table lamp, is a gorgeously unsettling piece of noir imagery, like something out of a '40s film. Martin Pakledinaz's costumes, which reset the action in the early '50s, contrast Madame Arcati's frightening ensembles with Ruth's haute-bourgeois good taste and Elvira's all-white ectoplasmic chic. The men's tailoring is extremely well done, too. Peter Fitzgerald's sound design includes some otherworldly effects as well as dance band music from a phonograph and amplification for Ebersole's scene-change arias.

When Blithe Spirit opened in London during World War II, there were a few mild grumbles that Coward was making fun of death; it went on to have the longest run of his career. The author knew what made people laugh, even in hard times; fortunately, this time out, he has actors and a director who know just where the laughs are. Wherever he is, he must be very, very, amused.--David Barbour