Notes by John Knowles with extracts from the Pearl Theatre Guide to Blithe Spirit © 2001 (Copy in Quark - Word - pdf format)

The most popular play in the Noël Coward canon is this glorious comedy about the occult written at a time when, due to government restrictions on theatre opening, his and others plays had ceased to grace the West End stage. His finances were in a far from fair state and when the ‘powers that be’ finally relented and theatres were allowed to open during daylight hours he realised that he had to deliver something commercial and match the wartime mood to pull in the crowds of leave-taking service personnel, and the many civilians still living in London.

The actress Joyce Carey and Noël Coward set of to the Italianate folly Portmeirion in Wales to write plays. An idea had already hatched in Noël’s mind of a large French house visited by the ghosts of its past but it was here in Clough William-Ellis’s fantasy village that the plot for the new play emerged and after seven days Blithe Spirit was all but finished. Noël Coward was fascinated with death. One of his hobbies was watching surgeries –
“I’ve witnessed death many times,” he asserted. “I once had a man die in my arms.”

In Private Lives, his play from 1930, Coward has Elyot say to Amanda – “Death is very laughable really, such a cunning little mystery. All done with mirrors.”

For Coward, death was a bit of a lark, something to be overcome with charm and wit.
In 1967 he wrote in Not Yet the Dodo and Other Verses:
I’m here for a short visit only
And I’d rather be loved than hated
Eternity may be lonely
When my body’s disintegrated
And that which is loosely termed by soul
Goes whizzing off through the infinite
By means of some vague, remote control
I’d like to think I was missed a bit.

Ghosts pop up in other Noël Coward plays as well as Blithe Spirit. In Cavalcade and Post Mortem they serve the function of ensuring reverence for the dead. In Shadow Play (1936), ghosts of the quarrelling Gayforths appear in a dream to recall their
romantic past and rekindle their threatened love.

Certainly death was on every Londoner’s mind in 1941, as the blitz raged about them, for ghosts found their way into other plays of the period, as well. Critic Gareth Lloyd Evans sees in this rebirth of interest in matters spiritual a hunger for reassurance that
the sacrifices of the war had not been in vain –“…a passionate faith that loved ones who, in reality, had been blown to pieces in the
trenches had passed on to a bourne from which they could not return but which was a place of happiness and content.”
Coward’s genius in Blithe Spirit was to make the notion of ghosts as sentimental, reassuring figures, by creating the vindictive, mischievous Elvira, who is bent on obtaining her own satisfaction after death, at the expense of her living loved one.

Blithe Spirit premiered during the darkest days of the War. On the opening night of the play (July 2, 1941) a bomb was dropped very near to the theatre. Elegantly attired patrons picked their way through the rubble on their way to see what would be the most popular comedy of the war.

A programme note said –
“If an air raid warning be received during the performance the audience will be informed from the stage... those desiring to leave the theatre may do so but the performances will continue.”

The comedy played at the Piccadilly and St. James’s Theatres for 1,997 performances arecord for a play until The Mousetrap arrived in town. It played at the Morosco Theatre in New York in November of that year with Clifton Webb in the main role.

There have been numerous professional revivals and the play continues to be the favoured Coward comedy for amateur companies worldwide. I has been directed in the UK, amongst others, by Harold Pinter and Tim Luscombe, and featured actors such as Simon Cadell, Joanna Lumley, Twiggy, Peggy Mount, Rula Lenska, Belinda Lang, Penelope Keith and Dora Bryan.

It has been adapted for film, television and radio. In 1945 the film version was directed by David Lean who had earlier all but directed Coward’s 1942 war effort, In Which We Serve and famously went on to direct Coward’s Brief Encounter. It had an all-star cast led by Rex Harrison and Kay Hammond with Margaret Rutherford in the defining interpretation of the spiritual medium, Madame Arcati.

In 1956 a US television adaptation by CBS featured Noël himself with Claudette Colbert and Lauren Bacall in what was universally agreed to be a rather uninspired performance. UK televised versions took place on the BBC in 1948 and on Granada 1964 and US radio version abound with Noël himself, with Margaret Leighton, Ronald Colman and Clifton Webb among the most notable participants.

It will always be a ‘house favourite’ for those who wish to escape the cares of real world and dabble with delight in the world of the supernatural. In essence it is – as with most of Coward’s plays – about life not death and the tortuous way we handle our relationships. As the Daily Mail, when talking about the likelihood of future performances said - paraphrasing Shelley’s ode To A Skylark: Hail to thee, Blithe Spirit, Bird thou’ll never get.

 

Notes by John Knowles (Copy in Quark - Word - pdf format)

Noël Peirce Coward was born at the end of the 19th century into a world bursting with the inventions of the Victorian age. Son of a domineering mother and a lacklustre father he invented himself in a career that ensured his name and work would be celebrated through to the 21st century.  He became the best all-rounder of the theatrical, literary and musical worlds of the 20th century. He invented the concept of celebrity and was the essence of chic in the Jazz Age of the 20s and 30s. His debonair looks and stylishly groomed appearance made him the quintessential icon of ‘the Bright Young Things’ that inhabited the world of The Ivy, The Savoy and The Ritz. Following his theatrical successes in the 1930s he was regarded as ‘The Master’, a nom d’honour that indicated the level of his talent and achievement in so many of the entertainment arts.

His private life was dominated by a desire to succeed. In a life of 73 years Coward wrote nearly 50 plays, over 400 songs and lyrics, books of verse, sketches, satire and short stories and a single novel – and he performed as one of the most successful cabaret artists to ever appear in Las Vegas. His disciplined approach to work and his commitment to his craft brought him great success in the 1920s and 30s following a writing and acting breakthrough with The Vortex performed in an ex-drill hall in Hampstead, North London. During the next 20 years Fallen Angels, Hay Fever, Easy Virtue, The Marquise and, as the 30s began, Private Lives, were all to celebrate success in London’s West End.  

In 1929 at the end of an exhausting decade of writing, acting and public adoration Coward set sail from San Francisco on a journey to join Geoffrey Holmesdale (Lord Amherst) in Tokyo for the start of a Far Eastern holiday. Whilst on board ship he received a daily reminder from Gertrude Lawrence in the form of her photograph staring at him from a travelling clock she had given him as a parting gift, that he had promised to write a play for them both. He discovered on arrival at The Imperial Hotel, Tokyo that Geoffrey was delayed and would not be with him for three days. The night before his arrival Noël went to bed early –

“…but the moment I switched out the lights, Gertie appeared in a white Molyneux dress on a terrace in the South of France and refused to go again until four a.m., by which time Private Lives, title and all had constructed itself.”

With the wisdom he had gained during the past decade he realised that it would be wise not to welcome a new idea too ardently so he –

 “…forced it into the back of my mind, trusting to its own integrity to emerge again later on, when it had become sufficiently set and matured.”

Noël and Geoffrey travelled on to Shanghai where Noël developed –

“ A bout of influenza … and I lay sweating gloomily in my bedroom in the Cathay Hotel for several days. The ensuing convalescence, however was productive, for I utilised it writing Private Lives. The idea by now seemed ripe enough to have a shot at it, so I started it, propped up in bed with a writing-block and an Eversharp pencil, and completed it, roughly, in four days.”

After revising and typing the script in Hong Kong Noël sent a copy to Gertrude Lawrence who started a confusing exchange of cables saying that she had read Private Lives and that there was nothing wrong in it that couldn’t be fixed. He wired back that the only thing that was going to be fixed was her performance.  Her hesitation was in fact over whether she could get out of a contractual agreement to be able to do the play.

The play opened on tour starting in Edinburgh and then to Liverpool, Birmingham, Manchester and Southsea before settling at The Phoenix in the West End for just over 100 performances. It was greeted as Coward says –

“…as being ‘tenuous’, ‘thin’, ‘brittle’, ‘gossamer’, iridescent’ and ‘delightfully daring’. All of which connoted, to the public mind, ‘cocktails’, ‘evening dress’,  ‘repartee’ and irreverent allusions to copulation, thereby causing a gratifying number of respectable people to queue up at the box office.”

The original cast of Noël and Gertie plus a young Laurence Olivier and Adrianne Allen (married in the previous year to actor Raymond Massey) in what Coward describes as parts that are –

“…little better than ninepins, lightly wooden, and only there at all in order to be repeatedly knocked down and stood up again.”

In the 1944 revival at the Apollo Theatre, London it ran for 716 performances after a 14 week provincial tour starring Peggy Simpson, John Clements, Raymond Huntley and Kay Hammond

In the 2001 a revival of Private Lives directed by Howard Davies received ‘rave reviews’ when it played for 5 months at the Albery theatre, London, and a further 5 months at the Richard Rodgers theatre on Broadway. Alan Rickman and Lindsay Duncan won the Best Actor and Best Actress at The Variety Club Show Business Awards for their performances.

As Alan Rickman said at the time – “I think we instinctively knew we would basically be saying the lines without any of the usual stuff that comes with Noël Coward. It’s at that point that you start to realize how brilliantly constructed the play is.”

His co-start Lindsay Duncan said – “What Coward understands is that if someone makes you laugh, it's a direct line to your heart. It is quite sophisticated wit, but it's also ridiculous and childish, and that’s the intimate side of it. He is showing something very private about them.”

People mistakenly believe that Coward’s plays are light-hearted drawing-room comedies – they couldn’t be more wrong.  Most of his plays are about people drawn from all classes and backgrounds struggling with life and the frailty of the human condition. That is why they continue to be revived across the world every year since his death in 1973.

Notes by the late Sheridan Morley (Copy in Quark - Word - pdf format)

It was early in the summer of 1928 that Noel Coward, then coming to the end of his twenties and already established as the playboy of the West End world with the successes of The Vortex. Hay Fever and Fallen Angels as well as such Cochran revues as This Year of Grace and On With The Dance began to consider the possibilities of his first full-scale operetta:

“The idea of Bitter Sweet appeared quite unexpectedly and with no other motivation beyond the fact that I had discussed with Gladys (Calthrop, his great friend and constant designer) the outline of a romantic operetta she and I were staying with Ronald Peake, her family solicitor, in Surrey and an hour or so before we were due to leave. Mrs Peake happened to play to us on the gramophone a new German orchestral record of Die Fledermaus Immediately a confused picture of uniforms, bustles, chandeliers and gas-lit cafes formed in my mind and later when we were driving over Wimbledon Common we drew the car to a standstill by the roadside and in the shade of a giant horse-chestnut tree mapped out the story of Sari Linden, The uniforms, bustles, chandeliers and gas-lit cafés all fell into place eagerly, as though they had been waiting in the limbo for just this cue to enter, It seemed high time for a little romantic renaissance and very soon a few of the preliminary melodies began to form in my head, however, the whole idea had to be shelved for a while owing to the urgency of other plans.”

These were for the Broadway production at This Year of Grace, but on his way over the Atlantic to star in that Noël wrote the first act of Bitter Sweet and once the revue had opened successfully he returned to his tale from the Vienna Woods

“During January and February 1929 I finished the operetta on which I had been working intermittently for the last few months. The book had been completed long since, but the score had been causing me trouble until one day, when I was in a taxi on the way back to my apartment after a matinee, the “I'll See You Again” waltz dropped into my mind, whole and complete, during a twenty minutes' traffic block. After that everything went smoothly and I cabled to Cockie in London suggesting that he start making preliminary arrangements regarding theatre, opening dates etc”

‘Cockie’ (the impresario Charles B Cochran) did just that, though not without a little difficulty. Once a title had been found, thanks to a suggestion by Alfred Lunt in New York, the central question was who should play Sari, the character who starts the operetta as the dowager Marchioness at Shayne in 1929 and then, by flashback to the Vienna at 1880, drops fifty years to become the tragic romantic heroine who loses her lover in a duet. The first idea had been for Coward's childhood friend and partner Gertrude Lawrence to play the role, but when he realised that her voice could not carry so long or demanding a score he promised her a play instead (in fact Private Lives) and told Cochran to approach Evelyn Laye.

Miss Laye had however not forgiven Cochran or Coward for bringing her husband Sonnie Hale together with Jessie Matthews in This Year of Grace, a partnership which led to the ending of the Laye-Hale marriage Accordingly she turned the role down, though did eventually take it over in London and then scored a tremendous success on Broadway: but in the meantime Coward was without a leading lady until Alex Woollcott suggested the American actress Peggy Wood, who went immediately into rehearsal at the end at May 1929.

Bitter Sweet was, wrote Noel later, “a musical that gave me more complete satisfaction than anything else I had yet written. Not especially on account of its dialogue, or its lyrics, or its music, or its production, but as a whole in the first place it achieved and sustained the mood of its original conception more satisfactorily than a great deal of my other work. And in the second place, that particular mood at semi-nostalgic sentiment, when well done, invariably affects me very pleasantly. In Bitter Sweet it did seem to me to be very well done, and I felt accordingly very happy about it.”

His first venture into the world of operetta was a lavish return to the Viennese past in three acts and six scenes, with a score that represents Coward at his closest to Lahar and even Novello with lilting, unashamedly sentimental numbers like Ziegeuner and If Love Were All as well as the classic I’ll See You Again which over the years proved to be one of the greatest song hits he ever had: “Brass bands have blared it, string orchestras have swooned it, Palm Court quartets have murdered it, barrel organs have ground it out in London squares and swing bands have tortured it beyond recognition and I am still very fond of it and very proud at it.”

In the gloom that followed the General Strike, Coward had decided that the time was ripe for a little romantic escapism and Bitter Sweet was just that, a surrender to the charm and the emotion that had filled the musical theatre of Noel's stagestruck childhood but laced now with the occasional acidity of Green Carnation and Ladies of the Town. If Bitter Sweet was not one of the original tales from the Vienna Woods, it was certainly a very passable imitation.

Coward himself directed an original cast featuring George Metaxa, Ivy St Helier (as Manon who has the ‘talent to amuse’ song: she later missed several performances having broken her leg in two places. “I never knew”, murmured Noel, “that it had two places”), Robert Newton in pre-Hollywood days and Alan Napier, later also a stalwart of the California Raj of expatriate English character actors. At stake here was a Cochran budget of over twenty thousand pounds as a gesture of considerable faith in Coward's first major work as a composer, and the first big show for which he alone could be held totally responsible as writer, composer, lyricist and director,

“I would not” Cochran told the company after seeing their final dress-rehearsal in Manchester, “part with my rights in this show for a million pounds” and his optimism proved almost immediately justified, The pre-London run was a riotous success and though some West End reviews were deeply grudging, James Agate wrote for the Sunday Times of “a stupendous opus”, paying lavish tribute to the choreography of Tilly Bosch and the sets at Ernst Stern and Gladys Calthrop before adding that “Mr Coward has done a thundering job”. The Times however thought the score “a naive medley for a man of Mr Coward's talents” and the fact that Noël had created a one-man operetta unequalled in the London Twenties seemed to go largely unnoticed by critics generally prepared to concede not much more than “a thoroughly good light entertainment”.

It was left to the fashion editor of Vogue to note that “tiara'd women clapped till the seams of their gloves burst; the older generation could say with more complacency than truth that this was the way they had fallen in love, and the younger generation were wondering if in rejecting romantic love they might not have been missing something”.

The journalistic estimate was that Bitter Sweet might survive at Her Majesty's for about three months; in fact it opened there on July 12 1929 and lasted for eighteen months before transferring to the Palace, and it then ran on (or cut-price audiences at the Lyceum until April 1931 All in all. nearly a million people saw it during more than 750 London performances, and counting the subsequent productions in Paris (where Jane Marnac did it as Au Temps des Valses) and on Broadway (where Evelyn Laye did at last play the part that might have been written for her) as well as the movie rights and song royalties, it would be fair to assume that over the years Bitter Sweet made its author richer by a quarter of a million pounds

It was twice filmed, once with Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravey in a Herbert Wilcox production of 1933 which cut most of the last act, and then again In 1941 as an MGM vehicle in lurid technicolour for Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald, as directed by Woody van Dyke in what Noel was to describe in his Diaries as “a nauseating hotchpotch of vulgarity, false values, seedy dialogue, stale sentiment, vile performances and abominable direction”.

But it was left to the American author and historian William Bolitho to write the best epitaph for Bitter Sweet, Discussing the operetta's rare quality of lyrical nostalgia he noted: “you find it faintly when you look over old letters the rats have nibbled at, one evening you don’t go out; there is a little of it, impure and odorous, in the very sound of barrel organs in quiet squares in the evenings, putting out in gusts that intoxicate your heart. It is all very well for beasts to have no memories but we poor humans have to be compensated”.