When Charles summons a psychic to perform a seance in his home so that he can observe the “tricks of the trade” and use them as the basis for his next novel, he gets more than he bargained for.
Noël Coward’s 1941 play and its 1945 film version (about to be remade) are such perennial national spirit-raisers that it is no spoiler to say what happens next: Charles’s deceased wife, the beautiful, ever-young Elvira, returns and only Charles, it seems, can see or hear her, much to the exasperation of his second wife, Ruth.
The idea is as silly and gossamer slight as Elvira’s shimmering, becomingly floaty dress. So why does this dated, country-house comedy continue to haunt our stages and screens?
Richard Eyre’s deft production satisfyingly suggests an answer. Skilfully crafted performances help us appreciate how Coward builds his verbal and physical comedy of the ghost in the drawing room around grains of pain of loss.
Geoffrey Streatfeild’s worldly Charles and Emma Naomi’s self-centred Elvira both seem shadowed by longings for a rose-tinted, unattainable past. Lisa Dillon’s brittle Ruth battles in vain against that invisible foe - a lover’s past love.
Glimpses of real emotions add bite to the absurdities of the situation. The comic interplay of tensions between real and imaginary is touchingly personified in Jennifer Saunders’s Madame Arcati, her too, too solid, limb-jerking flesh striving to reach a spiritual plane but only connecting with an adenoidal child ghost with a head cold.
• At Theatre Royal, Bath until 6 July
