Angela Lansbury enlivens an ectoplasmic farce
What’s better than one ghost? Two ghosts, and Noel Coward serves the pair of them up wittily in what is likely his most famous stage work, Blithe Spirit, now at the Golden Gate Theater under SHN auspices.
What pleasure there is in a totally meaningless play! The most famous example is, of course, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, but Moliere wrote some, and so did Shakespeare–A Midsummer Night’s Dream is sprightly and lovely, but it’s as fatuous as can be. So what? Blithe Spirit employs high-style writing in the service of nothing much, but the comedy’s dry wit, and its dry twit protagonist, Charles Condomine, are breezily entertaining, even if the breeze blows away the minute you stroll out of the theater.
The important thing is, you stroll out smiling, and you smile for another reason at this production–it stars show biz legend Angela Lansbury.
It’s likely no one who saw Lansbury as Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in 1944‘s National Velvet would have predicted great things for her, and in fact she was never a top movie star, though she was impressive in The Manchurian Candidate. But then came TV (Murder She Wrote) and Broadway (Mame, Sweeney Todd, Beauty and the Beast), and the rest is history.
This Blithe Spirit is smartly directed by Michael Blakemore. Its most famous character is the quirky Madame Arcati, a small town spiritualist played with endearing eccentricity by Lansbury, who is invited to dinner at Charles and Ruth Condomine’s country house with an ulterior motive. Charles’s latest mystery novel is about a “homicidal medium.” He doesn’t believe in the supernatural, but he needs to do a little research, so while Madame Arcati goes through her paces, featuring table-thumping by an invisible child intermediary, the Condomines and their guests, Dr. and Mrs. Bradman, secretly laugh at her. They shouldn’t. Arcati turns out to be the real deal, and in shaking up the spirit world, she inadvertently dislodges Charles’s first wife, Elvira, a sassy blonde vision, who floats into the Condomine’s lives and refuses to float out.
Charles is smug and superficial, marked by an unearned sense of his own right to a smooth ride through life, so we don’t mind at all when he gets his comeuppance. The expert Charles Edwards (you’ve seen him on Downton Abbey) plays him with amusing flair, and he’s well-matched by the equally expert Charlotte Perry as his wife, Ruth. As the Bradshaws, Simon Jones and and Sandra Shipley do a nice job of not getting in the way of the main action, and Susan Louise O’Connor steals the show whenever she shows up as the dithering maid, Edith. Embodying Elvira, Jemima Rooper is sexily kittenish. The only possible objection to her (and I’m not making it) is that she’s so deliciously voluptuous it’s hard to take her for a spirit; she makes you want to get your hands on her.
Then there’s Angela Lansbury as Madame Arcati. The opening night audience had clearly came to see her–it greeted her entrance with cheers–and her sly expertise and octogenarian sprightliness rewarded all hopes.
Blithe Spirit has settled into the SHN schedule until February. Upcoming SHN offerings include Newsies and Matilda, along with encores of The Book of Mormon and The Phantom of the Opera, and a final visit with megastar Dame Edna Everage. For tickets/information call 666-746-1799 or visit shnsf.com.
–ROBERT HALL