LONDON — Noël Coward wrote “Blithe Spirit” in a mere six days, and the perennially popular play opened on the West End in 1941, running for nearly 2,000 performances — setting a record in London for a nonmusical.
Its longevity back then is in stark contrast with the most recent outing of the play here, with Jennifer Saunders, of “Absolutely Fabulous” fame, playing the bicycle-riding medium Madame Arcati, who communicates with the dead. A victim of circumstances beyond the control of even the most supernaturally minded, the director Richard Eyre’s comparatively somber revival played its last performance at the Duke of York’s Theater on March 14; the run had been due to finish on April 11.
The production closed early after London’s West End theaters took coordinated action on Monday to close themselves down and help stop the spread of the coronavirus. London’s West End, like Broadway, has gone dark, and no one knows when the lights will come back on.
As premature closings go, the timing here was somewhat ironic, when you consider how audiences throughout World War II flocked to “Blithe Spirit,” Coward’s inquiry into the frustrations, erotic and otherwise, of Charles (Geoffrey Streatfeild), a novelist whose first wife returns from the grave. (She died, we’re told, while recovering from pneumonia, which may well have had an eerie resonance for nervous playgoers today.)
When she rises up, the mischievous Elvira (Emma Naomi) scatters calculated chaos in her wake. It’s giving nothing away to tell you that she ends up taking Charles’s second wife, the whiplash-tongued Ruth (Lisa Dillon, giving the performance of the night), over to the other side with her, though neither woman will go quietly from the land of the living.
This was easily the least buoyant “Blithe Spirit” I’ve seen, which was presumably intentional on the part of Eyre, the distinguished director who once ran the National Theater. The trend of late has been to find in Coward’s outwardly breezy plays something more psychologically acute, as was the case when Andrew Scott, of “Fleabag” fame, stormed the Old Vic last summer in “Present Laughter.” Against expectation, a character long presented as a devil-may-care narcissist was revealed to be an anxious man-child, as well. Both revivals remind us that Coward possessed a keen understanding of human behavior, in addition to a quick wit.
In this “Blithe Spirit,” Charles and Ruth’s marriage seems far from blissful well before Elvira arrives on the scene, and Eyre takes the verbal brickbats they lob at each other for real. This, like “Present Laughter,” is a Coward play centered around a man who draws women to him when he would rather be left alone: Both plays end with their flustered heroes fleeing female companionship, but for what precisely? Coward leaves the sequels up for grabs.
The fate of this show, however, is sealed — though no one could have guessed how quickly it would flit from view. Think of the cast as the casualties of an invisible terror. It was one that Saunders, top-billed albeit in a supporting role that Judi Dench is playing in a forthcoming film, acknowledged when Madame Arcati — a germaphobe before her time — reacted in spontaneous disgust at shaking another character’s hand. I doubt those who laughed at that gesture last week would do so now.
Across London last week, a city in gathering distress was met with theater that chimed with the prevailing mood. Before the shutdown, I caught what turned out to be the final matinee of “Shoe Lady,” an arrestingly quirky play from E.V. Crowe at the Royal Court Theater, best described as a surrealist nightmare in the style of Caryl Churchill.
“It’s like we’re all on the edge,” says Viv, a realtor whose life goes into free-fall when she loses a shoe on the London Underground. “Buck up,” she says, all the while succumbing to a growing sense of anxiety, brilliantly captured by Katherine Parkinson, accentuating her character’s panic the more determinedly she keeps smiling. Running just over an hour, Vicky Featherstone’s production can’t have anticipated how much the play, which might otherwise have seemed a theatrical caprice, felt instead like a parable of precariousness in a society that, much like Viv, seems to be losing its grip.
The connection between life and art was even more keenly felt on Monday at the Southwark Playhouse, in southeast London, one of the few theaters to offer a show on the evening when the bigger houses around town were calling it quits.
There, I was among a surprisingly full house to catch the last performance of the director Jonathan O’Boyle’s hyper-intense revival of “The Last Five Years,” the Jason Robert Brown musical about a couple falling apart. (Think of it as the “Marriage Story” of the early 2000s.) The conceit of a show that alternates perspectives across 90 minutes is that one character, Jamie (the excellent Oli Higginson), tells his version of events from the beginning, whereas his ex, Cathy (Molly Lynch), begins her version of events at the end.
But there was no doubt for those in the room that we were all witnessing a finish of a different sort, given that it is entirely unclear when any of us will find ourselves in a London playhouse again. The audience that night had seemed especially focused, as if everyone present was savoring for keeps the experience of live performance.
Taking an empty Underground train home, I couldn’t help but feel that Jamie and Cathy’s unraveling had acquired a resonance well beyond what the composer-lyricist Brown could have imagined. I won’t soon forget the surge of feeling throughout the auditorium when the show got to its closing sequence, and ended on a single word: “Goodbye.”
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