2019-2020 ONE ACT At Waterville High School Drama
THE STORY: Blithe Spirit is a comic play by Noël Coward. The play concerns the socialite and novelist Charles Condomine, who invites the eccentric medium and clairvoyant, Madame Arcati, to his house to conduct a séance, hoping to gather material for his next book. The scheme backfires when he is haunted by the ghost of his annoying and temperamental first wife, Elvira, after the séance. Elvira makes continual attempts to disrupt Charles’s marriage to his second wife, Ruth, who cannot see or hear the ghost.
Video Of Blithe Spirit
The Film Version Of Blithe Spirit
Blithe Spirit is a 1945 British fantasy-comedy film directed by David Lean. The screenplay by Lean, cinematographer Ronald Neame and associate producer Anthony Havelock-Allan is based on producer Noël Coward’s 1941 play of the same name, the title of which is derived from the line “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! Bird thou never wert” in the poem “To a Skylark” by Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The film features Kay Hammond and Margaret Rutherford, in the roles they created in the original production, along with Rex Harrison and Constance Cummings in the lead parts of Charles and Ruth Condomine. While not very successful at the time and a disappointing adaptation according to Coward himself, it has since come to be considered notable for its Technicolor photography and Oscar-winning visual effects in particular and has been re-released several times, notably as one of the ten early David Lean features restored by the British Film Institute for release in 2008.
Watch Some Movie Clips From The Original Film Version Of Blithe Spirit
Blithe Spirit (1945) Movie Clip | As You’re Not In The Navy
Blithe Spirit (1945) Movie Clip | Ventriloquism!
Blithe Spirit (1945) Movie Clip | I Don’t Happen To Be An African Native