Madame Arcati, offering bicycling tips to the more languid ladies at the Condomines’ dinner party, tells them how to face the steep bits. “Down with your head, up with your heart — and you’re over the top in a flash!” OTT indeed she is, when played by Alison Steadman in Thea Sharrock’s romping production from the Theatre Royal, Bath.
The village medium is a trickier part than it seems. Arcati can be tremulous or vigorous, barmy or bracing, a don or a scoutmistress. The script, knocked off in one of Noël Coward’s bursts of five-day creativity, demands all those qualities.
So Steadman makes her dominance clear from her first appearance, in a virulent easyJet-orange frock and leather aviator’s helmet. And once the seances start, you never saw such screaming, scampering, grunting and exotic gesticulation, nor such rapid returns to tweedy WI manners laced with mystic philosophy.
“The time is drawing near,” says her host jocosely. “Who knows?” replies Steadman with a wonderful auntly righteousness. “It may be receding!”
Against this, the others must play with brittle heightened realism, coming into full focus only while Hurricane Steadman is safely offstage. This they do, beautifully.
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Robert Bathurst as Condomine is a born Coward hero, his world-weary wittiness shading — as one wife snarls — to “seedy grandeur”. The women are perfectly contrasted: Hermione Norris as Ruth is steely, touchy, and convincingly desperate, with some nice abrupt losses of control in the second act. Ruthie Henshall is viciously vivacious, demanding, mischievous and irresistible in wispy chiffon with some unnaturally bright white teeth.
This most absurd of comedies always feels haunted itself: Coward’s most heartfelt perennial themes flitting by as jokes. Here is the brittle glamour of impossible people, the possibility of ménages-a-trois, the bickering of lovers when passion fades, the veil of flippancy that wards off painful feeling.
It is good that Sharrock links the rapid scene-changes with snatches of Coward’s voice haunting us himself in turn, as his exasperated avatar wrestles with the appalling riddle of love.
But the leitmotif in this production is merry exaggeration. From the opening minutes when Jodie Taibi, making the most of Edith the maid, scores a solo round of applause by solving the problem of how to lower a tea-tray to a table by slowly, anxiously, doing the splits. It’s out to amuse, and succeeds all the way.
Every generation deserves to come to Blithe Spirit fresh and surprised, and my companion aged 23 did just that. As the drawing room finally disintegrated into otherworldly chaos, it was a pleasure to see him so happy. As was I.
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Box office: 0844 412 4658, to June 18