Blithe Spirit

 Blithe Spirit

 

I got to be part of the cold reading of Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward. I had just a few particular thoughts.

 

1.It has a bit where A, a ghost, is visible to B but not to C, so that, when they are all in the same room, C takes what B says to A as directed at her. It is, for me, a joke that gets old. It reminds me though of the virtuosic things that the British television show Coupling does with misunderstandings and mistakes, representing an incredible progress from the same basic idea. Watching Coupling, one has to strain to keep straight what the real story is and how each character is seeing things. This is more work than I’m used to doing for comedy, but they mostly pull off amazing tricks, and invent a kind of puzzle-drama that’s also funny.

 

2.Related to 1: it struck me as odd that Blithe Spirit would naturally be included in discussions of contemporary drama but Coupling wouldn’t, though, on every measure I can think of, Coupling is better at doing the same sorts of things, and also has taken on other interesting challenges.

 

3.When I was doing interviews, I was invited to a talk by a traveling troupe of ghosthunters, working for wealthy St. Paul people who wanted to get rid of their ghosts. (They split their time between the U.S. and Britain: Brits want to document their ghosts. It adds charm, and you can charge for charm.) Anyway, I thought I might try to do an interview after the talk, but some of the stories they told were frightening -- I didn’t want to meet any of the creatures that might have followed these people home. That’s part of the non-comic part of Blithe Spirit: this writer, having messed around with poverty, which he didn’t understand, for a previous book, is now proposing to mess around with ghosts. The picture of the writer as meddler, and even as endangered meddler, is quite powerful. This isn’t Topper. It reminds me, in a strange way, of the two good movies that came out at almost the same time about Capote writing In Cold Blood (“Capote” and “Infamous”); Capote doesn’t come out of that with a whole skin, either.

 

4.The descriptions of Blithe Spirit talk about it as a light thing to cheer people from the miseries of the bombing and the battles. But I don’t think that I would be all that cheered up, if I were surrounded with random death and all that unfinished business resulting from the war and the bombings, to be reminded that pettiness and grabbiness might just go on and on and on forever, that one’s faults could become one’s eternal destiny. It is a message more for a morality play than for a comedy.