Blithe Spirit
Gielgud Theatre
If you’d asked me before this week, I’m afraid I’d have guessed Angela Lansbury had already reached the spirit world. I’ve always imagined her eternally inhabiting the mid-twentieth century, as the prim but decidedly experimental home front heroine in Bednobs and Broomsticks (1971) or the icy Cold War matriarch in The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Yet at the age of 88 she’s alive and kicking – nigh twerking – at the Gielgud Theatre in Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward’s tale of a newly re-married widower, who inconveniently rouses the ghost of his first wife and finds himself committing “astral bigamy”.
In 1941, Blithe Spirit constituted wartime escapism for Coward, so with her clipped vowels and Queen Mother drawl, Lansbury is still on home territory. I’d have loved to hate it – she does need to be punished for all those God-awful episodes of Murder, She Wrote – but as Madame Arcati, the dotty medium whose séance kickstarts this domestic haunting, she could put a smile on the face of Diogenes.
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