Noël Coward’s ghostly comedy
Blithe Spirit first hit audiences back in 1941 in the West End. However, if ghosts are real in the sense that Coward imagined them, surely he was haunting this ghastly adaptation of his play.
The real spirit of this play is Elvira (Mann), a successful mystery novelist’s late wife who is summoned from the dead after a washed up spiritualist (Dench) accidentally conjures her. This is a wonderful convenience for writer Condomine (Stevens), who used his previous wife’s stories for his books, but this twisted ménage à trois is the last thing his new wife (Fisher) wants to compete with.