Raising the spirits
Lloyd Evans
Blithe Spirit
S'at
The Earthly Paradise Almeida
Thumping great crowds at the Savoy. The Peter Hall Company's production of Blithe Spirit is exactly what Noel Coward deserves, a reverent, effective, and somehow cheerless show. Penelope Keith brings an air of military briskness to the dippy psychic, Madame Arcati. An unusual interpretation, but it works perfectly well. My niggles are with Wardrobe. Arcati's costume of loon pants and beads looks quite out of place in the 1940s. And the hair tints are wrong. The play's central theme is the morbid jealousy between the former and present lovers of Charles Condomine. Elvira is the deceased wife,
Ruth the current squeeze. The clues are in the names. Ruth is grounded, earthy, with a tendency to bluntness. Elvira is a creature of the clouds and the upper air. Coiffure should reinforce these contrasts: Elvira blonde, Ruth brunette. Unfortunately, Joanna Riding (Ruth) is blonde, while Amanda Drew (Elvira) is brunette. Which is bad luck if the production can't stretch to two bottles of Clairol. None of this will affect the show's success with the public. Last Saturday afternoon I was transported to Kelmscott Manor, the Oxfordshire house shared by Dante Gabriel Rossetti and William 'Wallpaper' Morris. Peter Whelan's new play portrays their relationship and examines the strains caused by Rossetti's passion for Janey, Morris's nymph-like bride. The domestic details are interesting enough, but the script lacks forward momentum. Hardly anything happens. Eggs are eaten. People exchange greetings. The sun comes out from behind a cloud. Someone makes a pot of tea. Wallpaper Will unfolds his embroidery and picks out a few stitches. Dogs bark. Leaves fall. Dust gathers. Paint dries. The slackness is realistic, but its hold on the imagination is as frail as a deathbed handshake. I'd call it Big Brother for the Friends of the V&A.
Mr Wallpaper is played by Nigel Lindsay, who recently portrayed a chirpy taxi-driver in a spate of NatWest adverts. For this show, he's sprouted a beard and shoved a fat pillow down his waistcoat. He mopes up and down, forearms a-flail, slapping his forehead a little too often, rhapsodising about Tudor cottages and calling for 'Art that rises up from the PEOPLE!'
Then there's Mrs Wallpaper, a role for which Saffron Burrows seems to have been born. She looks every inch the beautiful, simpering hysteric. Slim as a wand and vague as a snowflake, she drifts around wearing a selection of velvet caftans and embodying the spirit of High-Victorian spinelessness. 'Who am I to pretend I understand anything?' Then there's Rossetti, who hasn't yet recovered from having been named after a poet, an archangel and a pizza restaurant. Unable to choose between literature or painting, he devotes himself to self-dramatising vacuities. 'It's as if the sun had overslept!' is his first epigram of the morning. Before taking a bath, '0 Lord! Another ritual cleansing.' Sipping whisky, 'The soul must seek what comforts it can to help it through the dark night of creation.' Composing a couplet, 'Who am I to write poetry when there's a whole conclave of critics utterly convinced that I shouldn't?' And, during one metaphysical interlude, he wriggles on the floor like an electrocuted newt invoking 'the masochistic, self-torturing type of happiness I have as my personal albatross'.
I began to wonder about the playwright's sources. If Whelan invented these codBohemian bleatings, his satirical cruelty towards his characters seems futile and bizarre. I suspect the quotes are lifted from letters, perhaps written at night and probably fuelled by despair, loneliness and laudanum.
In the interval, my neighbour demanded to know why I was scribbling. A reviewer? She offered her opinion. The show was static, dull and 'a bit Radio Four'. Another woman, unknown to the first, joined in the conversation, concur ring enthusiastically with this savage critique. But they both returned for the second half. Now, it's easy for me to mock this play, but it's a huge, huge hit. The Sat mat was a sell-out. The producers know their audience minutely, because there they all were, on a winter's afternoon, the culture-junkies and museum-flockers, squinting at the programme and muttering about the price of it. Slowcoach grandads in anoraks and Hush Puppies, grey-permed crones in pleated skirts and kilts, with their bifocals dangling from their necks on string. The Arts Council is getting good value for its subsidy, transforming Islington's playhouse into a highclass drop-in centre for the overeducated. A boring show, yes, in many ways hut, with high culture, being bored is part of the attraction.
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