They have a strange fascination with mystical, mid-1960s musicals at the Bridewell. This time last year they brought us On a Clear Day You Can See Forever, which dealt with reincarnation. Now they offer a rare sighting of Hugh Martin's and Timothy Gray's 1964 musical version of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, which takes us into the esoteric world of ectoplasm. The show is about raising the dead, and yet this fossilised specimen comes only fitfully to life.
A musical based on an existing play has to add a dimension missing in the original. But Coward's "improbable farce", dealing with a writer plagued by his dead wife's ghost and his living wife's jealousy, is complete in itself. The bland songs don't so much advance the action as impede it. In Coward's original, it is clear from the start that the hero's second wife, Ruth, ruefully accepts that her predecessor, Elvira, was more physically attractive. The musical kicks off with Ruth redundantly asking: "Was she prettier than I?"
What the musical does do is open out Coward's play, so that we get to see the happy medium, Madame Arcati, surrounded by Bohemian acolytes in her coffee shop "a few blocks below Sloane Square". In the Broadway version this gave Beatrice Lillie a chance to display her legendary eccentricity. Since he lacks a precious Lillie, I wish the show's director, Raymond Wright, had taken advantage of recent scholarship. Apparently Coward based Madame Arcati on the lesbian novelist Radclyffe Hall, who often sought to contact the spirit of her dead lover. A monocled, besuited Arcati exploring the well of loneliness might be an interesting innovation, but here Gay Hamilton makes her merely a mildly raffish figure trailing diaphonous scarves.
Only one number, Home Sweet Heaven, lifts the show above the amiably banal, and it's no surprise to learn that it bears Coward's lyrical imprint. Sung by Elvira, it envisions the empyrean as a historical melting-pot where "we all sit round King Arthur's table, me and Freud and Cain and Abel". For the most part, however, the songs never match the starched wit of Coward's dialogue. One is left spasmodically to enjoy Coward's faultless ear for camp outrage - "A woman in Cynthia Cheviot's position would hardly wear false pearls" - and perfectly decent performances by James Staddon as the haunted hero, Sarah Payne as a slightly too scrumptious Ruth and Kate Graham as a suitably ethereal Elvira.
Since the Bridewell is into rare revivals, a second look at Sail Away, which Coward himself wrote, might yield more fruit than this valiant attempt to resurrect the dead.
Until February 3. Box office: 020-7936 3456.
