NOËL COWARD wrote Blithe Spirit in just five days, during the darkest, deadliest heart of the Second World War. It was an unrepentant success; running for nearly 2,000 performances in London where it broke all ticket sales records for the London Theatre, a record that it held for more than 30 years. But Coward was already enormously popular in both the UK and the United States by the time Blithe Spirit premiered, and his fame attracted other London celebrities, characters, and wannabes to him like moths to a flame. Among those drawn in by Coward’s gravity was one remarkable character that played an enormously important role in the creation of Blithe Spirit: Radclyffe-Hall.
Marguerite Antonia Radclyffe-Hall was born on the 12th of August 1880 at West Cliff, Bournemouth. At the age of twenty-one she inherited a large sum of money left in trust by her grandfather Charles Radclyffe-Hall. Radclyffe was a lesbian and she lived with the singer Mabel Veronica Batten, who was twenty-five years her senior, until Mabel’s death in 1916. Soon afterwards Radclyffe began a relationship with Una Elena Troubridge, a talented sculptor and high society staple. Although she had enough money to live in leisure, Radclyffe decided to take up writing and published several popular novels. In 1928 Radclyffe published her most controversial work, The Well of Loneliness, a tragic novel about the life of a lesbian, which conveys the message that lesbians cannot help being what they are and are unfairly persecuted by society.
In the early years of Radclyffe’s affair with Una Troubridge, the two women began to develop a deep interest in the occult and, specifically, with American spiritualism – a psychic fad that had traveled to the UK from the United States in the early 1900s. (These infamous American mediums, with their brash personalities, uncouth accents, and theatrical styles are the inspiration for our portrayal of Madame Arcati!) Radclyffe and Troubridge believed that they were able to communicate with Mabel, and receive messages from her from the “other side.” The two women trained in psychic practice for more than 8 years and there was something serious and weighty in these experiences for Radclyffe.
Coward spent time with Radclyffe starting in late 1923 or early 1924, and the two writers were ghostly influences on each other throughout their careers – with Radclyffe basing a number of her male characters after Coward, and Coward giving nods to Radclyffe in a number of his plays and one-acts. They shared a huge circle of friends, and Coward and Radclyffe spent time together at Coward’s country house, Goldenhurst, beginning in 1928 – at the height of the public furor over The Well of Loneliness, and during the height of Radclyffe’s training as a medium. It was during these visits that Radclyffe would provide Coward with the details of her supernatural exploits, of her hits and misses in seeking to contact the dead, and of her deep hunger for knowledge about the truth of life after death.
Although it would be more than a decade before Coward turned his attention to Blithe Spirit, his own recollections indicate that he had been contemplating a play about super-naturalism, séances, and ghostly visitations for a long time. It wasn’t until the Second World War that he felt it time to return to the idea. And he did – with a vengeance.
Underneath all of Blithe Spirit’s froth is a darkness, a bitterness, and a contempt that cannot be ignored. Coward despised convention: the conventions of heterosexual marriage, which are mercilessly lampooned in Blithe Spirit; contempt for the restrictions of social norms and niceties, which are so brilliantly ridiculed in Blithe Spirit through an unashamedly frivolous disregard for the dead and their memory; contempt for fads like super-naturalism and the occult through the skewering of Madame Arcati, and by assuring us, at the end, that she is a sham. His contempt for gender stereotypes and his dismissiveness of the possibility of love between the sexes, shown so brilliantly in Charles’ complete lack of interest in his second wife, and his pronouncement to Madame Arcati that, although he is fond of his wives, he by no means ever loved them.
Noël Coward also had great contempt for his own “friends,” their depth of feeling, their experiences, their styles of dress and speech, and their forced social interactions. He mocked their pain, and the ways they approached dealing with grief. He used Blithe Spirit to lampoon Radclyffe-Hall, to mock her desire to reconnect with her dead lover, her professions of love, her desire to be accepted, and her yearning to be connected to the broader world. Coward himself said, “It is my considered opinion that the human race is cruel, idiotic, sentimental, predatory, ungrateful, ugly, conceited and egocentric to the last ditch and that the occasional discovery of an isolated exception is as deliciously surprising as finding a sudden brazil nut in what you know to be five pounds of vanilla creams.”
There is a cruelty in Blithe Spirit, and a focus on the mockery of the frailties of human nature. Coward himself puts it perfectly and distinctly: “To take a gloomy view of life is not part of my philosophy; to laugh at the idiocies of my fellow creatures is.”
Scott Palmer
Founding Artistic Director
Bag&Baggage’s Blithe Spirit ticket and schedule information here.
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