Blithe Spirit

It's a very British way of protecting your dream.

It's owned by a charitable trust these days and is so weird and otherworldly it inspired Noel Coward to write Blythe Spirit, a play and film about a man who brings a medium into his home only for the medium to accidentally unleash the spirit of his patronising dead ex-wife on him.

The spirit

proceeds

... back when I was in my 20s, I played it.

And I did Blithe Spirit also, and a play called Fumed Oak.

But this is a real showpiece for an actress, perfect for at my time of life because she's, she feels that she's getting old, and she's not quite ready to retire, and she has one more play in her.

And, and so [laughs] I always say, "If this is my last play, it's the perfect play to say, 'Okay, bye.'" [laughs]

Yeah.

Made me think of the I don't have it off the top of my head, but thinking of Blithe Spirit and all of this is Noel Coward said that this is going to be a paraphrase.

It'll probably be a terrible paraphrase because I can't remember the exact quote.

But he said that nobody in it was likable because it wouldn't work if they were, you know, not not that we don't like them, but no one had any heart in it because if they had heart, it wouldn't work.

She made her debut in The Merchant of Venice in 1963, and there followed, amongst many other roles, Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Goneril in King Lear, Katherina in The Taming of the Shrew, Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.

Her favorite roles remained Lydia Languish in Sheridan's The Rivals and Elvira in Coward's Blithe Spirit, both perhaps hinting at a lightness of touch not always associated with the roles she played.

Her life, sadly, was not short of personal tragedy.

Her son, Dickon, hanged himself in the garage of the family home in December 2012 following a number of suicide attempts.

I am Tess Taylor, along with Eric Grant.

And today we are talking with our friends from the Greater Lakes Area Performing Arts, otherwise known as GLAPA, here to talk about Blythe Spirit.

With us in the studio, we have director Ben Gordon and also some actors, Ginger Lupella and Patrick Smallman are here first.

First, folks, welcome to Community Focus.

I thank you for having us.

Yes.

Maybe, Ben, we'll start with you as director of this show, Blythe Spirit.

Can you tell us a little bit about this show before we get into kind of the nuts and bolts of when people can come and see it?

Sabina Castelfranco on Emma Bonino, who's died age 78.

Now, at the age of 17, in her first paid acting role, Stephanie Cole was cast as the 90-year-old medium, Madame Arcati, in Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit.

It was the beginning of something of a recurring theme of being offered parts much older than her actual years.

Stephanie worked regularly in theater and TV, but her big break came midway through her career, as the TV editor of Radio Times, Caroline Frost, told me.