On Blueberry Hill – Trafalgar Studios At this moment of writing, they haven’t closed the theatres yet but it seems clear that they soon will. So, before they do and you are no longer able to see it, I urge you to bundle up – hat, gloves, mask, boots, isolation suit, space bubble, whatever will keep you safe – but please don’t miss On Blueberry Hill. How to define Sebastian Barry? Playwright, novelist, film director, or just plain writer, but to me, he is a poet, whatever platform he is currently using. Here he is using a playwriting form that another Irish playwright/poet Brian Friel perfected for The Faith Healer, alternating monologues, there are two characters here, not three. The two men incarcerated in a Dublin jail cell tell their stories, searing and tragic as well as rollickingly funny. How did these two, whose stories are so dreadfully intwined, end up in the same jail cell? Ah, thereby hangs only one of their tales. The actors, both brilliant, are Niall Buggy and David Ganly. I needn’t tell you anything about them or their performances except that you will easily forget you are in a theatre and these are actors, so amazingly in the moment are they. And you. Blithe Spirit – Duke of York’s Theatre Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit has never been out of the mainstream theatrical repertoire since its premiere in 1941. It is one of the best constructed comedies ever written, witty, brilliant and polished, even though he scribbled it down during a brief holiday in Wales in 1941 in less than a week. One of his four great plays (the others are Hay Fever, Private Lives, Present Laughter) this one is remarkable for many reasons, only one of which is that he wrote a light comedy about death while in the middle of a war. Well, death, resurrection, and ghosts. Doesn’t sound promising, does it? During WW2, Coward, having been several times rejected for official war work, finally gave up and went back to playwriting. What he wrote was Blithe Spirit which premiered in the depths of the War and the depths of an English winter, which he then toured all over the country with Judy Campbell as Elvira, the ghost wife. What a ghastly tour that must have been, in church halls and burnt-out schools, no heating, no lights, no transport and very little food. But the little company ploughed on, performing three plays in repertoire, Blithe Spirit, Present Laughter, This Happy Breed, and managing to get themselves to the next date despite often not knowing where the next date was. Judy Campbell told me that some nights it was so cold that Coward used to put his hands up her long sleeves and try to get warm by holding onto her breasts (“Darling, I thought I’d converted him. But no, it was just to stop us both from shivering on stage.” Richard Eyre’s new production at the Duke of York’s is very different. Anthony Ward’s sumptuous set for Charles and Ruth Condomine’s luxurious country house is the last word in 1950s elegance – Eyre has updated to the post-war “you’ve never had it so good” ‘50s, and the women’s clothes would have made my fashion-conscious mum drool. A successful author, hoping to pick up some background on spiritualism for his next book persuades his down to earth second wife, Ruth, to invite Madame Arcati, one of the neighbourhood ‘characters’, to perform a séance as after dinner entertainment for some neighbours. Assuming she is a charlatan, he is astonished to discover that she is the real thing, she has conjured the ghost of his first wife, the flighty Elvira, although only Charles (and the audience) can see her. The undisputed star of the evening is Jennifer Saunders’ turn as Madame Arcati. Kitted out in woolly cardigans and visible bloomers, she dons a fancy brocade coat and hat for the seances. There are lots of strange noises and hand flapping as she runs about the room which I found rather tiresome and less than hilarious but if you’re a fan going in, she’s a believable Arcati. I liked Lisa Dillon’s Ruth, incorporating the twittering and phoniness I remember from that era, only partially hidden under the second wife’s toughness. The entire cast is precisely drilled as we should expect from a Richard Eyre production because he, of course, gets every joke and every line that isn’t a joke and, if you’re paying attention, they’re all there. Blithe Spirit is, on one level, a frothy comedy, complete with one of Coward’s trademark comic maids and several ‘straight’ characters to point up the jokes. Like Sybil and Victor in Private Lives, Dr and Mrs Bradman exist in the plot merely to be knocked down, as Coward said, like skittles. But on another level Blithe Spirit is a meditation on the transience of life, on how death is omnipresent and how the joke, Coward is saying, is on us.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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