Jennifer Saunders is brilliant: Blithe Spirit at the Harold Pinter Theatre reviewed

Blithe Spirit is a comedy with the plot of a horror story. Charles, a middle-aged novelist, lives happily with his second wife, Ruth, but he accidentally conjures up the spirit of his first wife, Elvira, during a séance. He becomes the target of a ghostly murder plot. Elvira decides to bump Charles off and enjoy his company in the afterlife. The play was one of Noël Coward’s biggest hits and although the script is 80 years old, this production features intriguing new material.

The spiritualist, Madame Arcati, suffers from wind. She refers to her dietary anxieties several times and she mentions her dislike of red meat and roast pigeon. Jennifer Saunders (Arcati) uses little hand gestures and delicate flutterings of her clothes to draw our attention to her gastric problems. And though this is a curious detail to add to the play, it shows that the director, Richard Eyre, has investigated the script with fresh eyes and an inquisitive sensibility.

Arcati is often played as a batty old nuisance but Saunders takes her seriously and shows us a dedicated, intelligent professional who has very clear ideas about the service she offers. Fortune-telling and clairvoyancy are not part of her trade. She considers them fakery. She’s outraged when she learns that Charles had arranged the initial séance as a stunt to generate material for his next novel. Yet she can’t conceal her glee when she discovers that Elvira’s ghost has returned to the world of the living. This is the highlight of her career and she’s justly proud of her achievement. She does a little jig on the carpet to celebrate her triumph. But the jig is rather truncated because her joints are starting to stiffen up.

These deft little touches are brilliantly orchestrated by Saunders whose stage experience enables her to create an instant rapport with the audience.