Blithe Spirit: Draped in Wit, Starved of Spirit

Theatre Calgary is staging Blithe Spirit at the Max Bell Theatre from the 18th of March to the 13th of April. The play follows the haunted matrimonies of Charles Condomine, whose attempt to research the occult leads to the spectral materialization of his first wife, Elvira, through the spiritual channeling of Madame Arcati. Noal Coward’s language is emblematic of verbal fencing and jagged satire, dripping with flair and style. As far as the production goes it was 'methodically executed', delivered with theatrical efficiency. The acting was reliable, and at times tipped towards the exceptional, supported by excellent production values. For many critics and reviewers, this is where it all ends, if the product is sharp and clean, then that is all the justification it needs. For the very few readers on this blog, you will know that we take quite a different approach to things here, we look not only for the gleams of excellence on the surface but for an ineffable pulse that gives a production life beyond its polish. Like the ghosts in this play, we are looking for the urgent or unforeseen to rupture the membrane of the mundane.

We are not only looking for enactment, but we are also looking for discovery for the stage to conjure up a trace of life that cannot be rehearsed, a visceral encounter with something that slips past technique and leaves the audience moved. Is this slightly unfair? Yes, only if theatre is seen as something to be consumed rather than felt. The thematic focus of the play, as explained in the play programme- conceptualizing the women in the play as encompassing the psycho-social diversity of femininity- was excellent. The demure and antinomian sexuality of Elvira, Madame Arcati’s willful and radical acceptance of her outlier status, Ruth’s dogged and tenacious intelligence, Ms. Bradman’s domestic conviviality – all traverse (and certainly do not exhaust) the complex spectrum of femininity, one that eludes neat social, ethical and cultural categorization.

Ted Hughes (British Poet & Writer) saw femininity as a metaphysical force, one that traverses the elemental and the mythic. That being said, there are problems to mythologizing femininity like this, it can open the door to all sorts of problematic moral frameworks, i.e. the dangerous and reductive binary of the Madonna-Whore complex. A more contemporaneous explanation of femininity can probably be found in Julia Kristeva’s (French Feminist & Philosopher) explanation of it, that it should not be thought of as something metaphysical in scope and scale, but as a state  of revolt – the result of women remaining on the margins of society and its symbolic orders. Women, for Kristeva, like the ghosts in Blithe Spirit, are destabilizing forces, rupturing the stability of our symbolic order.  No wonder Charles Condomine is at his wits end by the end of the play, his world has been inverted not only because of the spectral presence of his wives, but because he has encountered the feminine-as-other, uncontainable and incompatible with his male authored life.

For Kristeva, it is not necessarily an insult for women to be called irrational and intuitive, if anything it is a patent rejection of the masculine obsession with coherence, control and linear logic. It is a deep and guttural howl against the harshness and rigidity of our symbolic systems, which she calls the semiotic (the raw and emotional undercurrent beneath language) revolt of the oppressed. True to understanding the precarity of how otherness works and the fragile camaraderie it evokes, Ruth only really understands Alvira once she too is pushed to the margins (i.e., once she too is dead and becomes the second deceased wife), showing us that the shared comradeship and solidarity between outsiders is not always generated through choice or empathy, but through symbolic death and erasure. This is, both, a sobering and dark realization.  

The theatrical intersection of domestic instability and ghosts, in this play, is no theatrical accident but can be argued to be part of the thematic logic of the script. It reveals the family as a psychic pressure system, where the family functions not as an autonomous collection of individuals, but as a group that is pressured to conform to socially sanctioned roles. For R.D Laing (Scottish Psychiatrist), the family, far from being the site of personal and existential liberation, was social surveillance writ small, a psychic landscape of control with a closed circuit of meaning, constituted of its own normative rituals, and protocols. Elvira is not amenable to narratival control, she is the traumatic kernel of every family and like every repression she will eventually infiltrate domestic rationality, sabotaging it from within until its symptoms are recognized. Charles ultimately survives the spectral haunting of both his wives, but he is evidently unmoored by the end and though he sees himself as free, he is not, the cycle is bound to repeat itself. That being said, his escape in the end can in some ways be seen as the unfinished work of the feminine rebellion, the symbolic structure still stands and there is much work to be done in loosening its grip on the authorship of our shared reality. Or, if seen through an alternative reading, Charles's ultimate escape may be read as the fact that nothing really changes - the dialectic of power may be reset every once in a while but it will never be reinvented.

What is interesting about the play is that it was written by Noel Coward during the second world war, and all mention of the war was expunged from the dramatic ecology of the play. This was evidently done to provide people a means of entertainment as escape. This need not be seen through any sort of interpretive cynicism, but what it does show us, at the level of the script, is that the conditions are created for aesthetic repression. A human ecology that is hermetically sealed from the war, the traumatic kernel of the world is covered by the choreography of civility and wit, but true to what happens in the play, what is disavowed will always find a way to return to us, be it ghosts or repressed social and political energies.  

Tyrell Crews as Charles was debonair, playing with relaxed confidence. Some of his scenes were excellent, conserving dramatic energy for the big moments and working patiently towards the comic payouts and the crisp button lines. Ali DeRegt as Edith was comical, full of interesting affectations and antics. Louise Duff as Ruth commandeered the stage with performative tact and intelligence, her dramatic focus was sharp and suffused with controlled intensity. Meg Farhall as Mrs. Bradman was charming and ebullient. Emily Howard as Elvira played with an evanescent energy, portraying the character with airy mischief and sensuality, embodying someone no longer bound by the platitudes of the living. Christopher Hunt as Dr. Bradman played the character with effortlessness, playing the least untethered character on stage is not always as easy as it seems and requires aplomb, he had that in spades. Corrine Koslo as Madame Arcati played with outlandishly humorous energy, the physical comedy complemented by the staccato like dialogue delivery gave the character a jittery eccentricity, as if she were always on the edge of channeling occult energies at a moment’s notice. Nikki Loach’s direction (with Jennie Esdale) was crisp and sharp, everything on stage progressed with a methodical and deliberate beat, moving with tonal and rhythmic control. The production values were excellent. Narda McCaroll’s lighting design was beautiful, the pale silver light cast against the blue backdrop (symbolizing the outside of the house) created a strikingly liminal space, perfectly representing what the creative vision sought to capture (as explain in the programme notes), a threshold between the living and the spectral. The lighting used to depict daytime was elegant in its simplicity, underscoring the psychological disorientation of a human environment infused with spectrality. Scott Reid created a lovely set, full of evocative representations that conjured the aesthetic logic of a 1940’s household. Alixandra Cowman’s sound design was on point, complementing the drama with disciplined sonic choreography. The quick costume changes demonstrated a backstage ethic, by the stage managers (Jennifer Yeung & Allison Weninger), that was tightly coordinated and excellently managed. Ralamy Kneeshaw created great costumes, complementing the psychological profiles of the characters. Jane McFarlane, the dialect coach, did a great job with the accents, almost everyone sounded like they came fresh out of a BBC radio production straight from the 1940’s.   

To my earlier point, this is a methodically delivered production, so what is missing? It is the living pulse of a production beneath the gleam, considering that the play abounds with themes of haunted-ness and the occult it stays on the surface of these themes without bringing the traumatic wound of the play to the surface. Some will say, it’s a farce, it is not meant to bring that wound to the surface, the playwright did not intend it, so why should we? To this my answer would be, it is precisely the traumatic kernel of the play that gives the comedy its manic energy. Comedy, it is humbly submitted, is not an evasion of trauma, it is its most intense expression. Comedy is a form of truth, and it can be argued that is not engineered to resolve contradiction, but rather, stages its purest and most exposed form. The production, ironically, is a body with a symptom but no wound, and such a body is a body in name only, no matter how beautiful. Do I mean by this that one is to inflect the production with ideological hysteria and thematic overcoding? No, not at all, but creating pockets within the performance for dissonance to leak through the veneer, allowing the comedy to tremble on the edge of something darker. My argument is that the trauma is built into the very structure of the play, the surface is constructed to seal off a deeper rupture; death, disorder and emotional dissonance. There is wit, there is sardonic delivery and farcical exhibitionism, but that is not all there is.

Without some form of aesthetic re-engineering, this play will be performed the same way it has been performed for the last 70 odd years, and I assume it has probably been staged (minus the production values) the same way it was staged by Theatre Calgary in the 1980's. This is of course a wild surmise, but if that is the case then one needs to wonder whether plays like these have become petrified theatrical rituals, maybe Alvira is not the only ghost at the heart of this production, maybe it is also the dead weight of theatrical repetition, condemned to a half life as formulaic re-enactment. This is theatre but it is not dynamic theatre, it is situated somewhere between nostalgia and stasis. The broader question is: how long can this can survive for? Life has moved on from the 1940's, Noel Coward is still extremely relevant, but must we entomb his work in artistic mausoleums? We reinvent Shakespeare all the time, why not Coward? There is a real risk here; staging aesthetic interpretations that this generation outgrew a long time ago, thereby preserving the work only in form, but not in spirit. I do find it rather strange that the promotional materials around this production are predicated on the historical wounds around suppressed femininity but the production offers no real exposure, not in an ideological sense but in the sense of felt vulnerability. The production seems terrified of haunting itself, which is why it never confronts the wound but only accessorizes it. There is absolutely no courage in this production to break through the skin of the performance.

Like Alvira, the play is conjured only to be dismissed and exorcised as a compulsory ritual and sent back into the void. We wait, with bated breath, for the next scheduled resurrection of this play in 2045, not for a dynamic retelling but for the same bones to be dressed again.

Rating – 5/10