Blithe Spirit review: Jennifer Saunders is hysterically funny as one of drama’s greatest comic creations

As the psychic Madame Arcati in this marvellous production, Saunders channels AbFab’s Edina – only with more intrepidity

Saunders as unapologetically eccentric Arcati, with Geoffrey Streatfeild as Charles Condomine, Emma Naomi as Elvira, left, and Lisa Dillon as Ruth (Nobby Clark)

★★★★★

In this inspired revival of Noel Coward’s comedy, Jennifer Saunders socks us with a hysterically funny performance as Madame Arcati, the psychic invited round to supper for what she thinks are convivial, neighbourly reasons. In fact, it is a ruse, designed so that she can be observed performing a seance by Charles Condomine (Geoffrey Streatfeild), a smug novelist who is doing research on the “tricks of the trade” for his latest work-in-progress. At a book signing, I would unhesitatingly join the queue for one of the wonderfully wayward-sounding children’s books that Madame Arcati writes in her ectoplasm-free spare time, rather than for a full set of Condomine’s romantic efforts.

The uptight, class-constipated crew of fellow diners get a great deal more than they had bargained for (the joke is more on them than Arcati). The delicious results are calibrated with a deadly droll but upbeat eye for the self-deceptions of the British class system in Richard Eyre’s zestfully canny revival.

Arcati is one of dramatic literature’s greatest comic creations. And never has she apologised less for any perceived eccentricity than she does in Saunders’s portrayal. Her Arcati would be able to spell “beautician” backwards, but the psychic’s eyebrows suggest that “tweezers” are an alien concept to her.

Sprawled upside-down over the edge of the sofa, she is heedless to social niceties – in exposing her knickers or giving her bum an absent-minded scratch – while crankily laser-sharp about Dr Bradman’s laxity in trying to bring her round with brandy. Yes, there is a certain amount of consanguinity with AbFab’s Edina in this semi-domesticated forthrightness, but she could give her sitcom descendant lessons in genuine intrepidity.

Saunders’ Arcati gusts about and you hurtle round in her un-misgiving wake. I have never heard the speeches about her relationship with the minor royals – about whom she writes “enthusiastic biographies” – rattled off with such sublimely funny dearth of hesitation. The performance had me doubled up and weeping with laughter. She’s a TV don Talking Head avant la lettre. Not that she would ever stoop to an ingratiating grooming process.

For my money, though, the performance is matched by Lisa Dillon, who is beyond praise in the role of Ruth, the novelist’s second wife. Ruth’s suspicions that her spouse was more sexually compatible with his deceased first wife seem to be alarmingly confirmed when the seance causes Elvira (Emma Naomi) to materialise, gauzy-dressed, in flesh that is at once spectral and “too too solid”.

Naomi’s delightful, if unnerving, performance draws on the sense that this character was always a bit too good for this world – even when she was alive. By comparison, Dillon portrays the kind of woman whom English society relegates to the function of humouring the invidious man (note the way she calls the vivid, complacently anxious Charles “dah-leeng”) – the kind she would feel more at ease with if only she could wangle him into a straitjacket.

It’s a marvellous portrayal that never feels in the least like a wind-up toy; there is an aura of wistfulness about it that, throughout, complicates the unflagging, sensitive caricature.

Noel Coward is one of those artistes who managed to make an open secret of his gayness to a less broad-minded constituency who would have looked askance at, say, Liberace. If the second act of Coward’s comedy Private Lives is one of the most erotic instances in British drama of post-coital lust, there is a passage in Blithe Spirit that is likewise drenched in paradoxical sex. Elvira, because she is a spirit, cannot touch Charles. But there is a frisson-inducing togetherness achieved here, when Elvira sends a breeze to ruffle his thinning hair.

The mayhem this revenant wreaks with flying books and flower arrangements is an index of the repression raging in this neck of our green and pleasant land. There are always subtle psychological filaments in this interpretation between the inner lives of the characters and the elating slapstick.

A new movie version of Coward’s play is in the offing. If the makers have any sense, they will be slipping incognito into Eyre’s theatrical reboot to refresh their sense of why this theatrical warhorse is also, imperishably, a comic gift horse.