Blithe Spirit (Methuen Modern Plays) (Modern Classics) - Softcover

Coward, Noël

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0413771970 ISBN 13: 9780413771971

Publisher: Methuen Drama, 2002

Synopsis

I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war.' Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longestrunning comedy in British Theatre for three decades thereafter. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a spirit medium Madame Arcati (originally performed by Margaret Rutherford) Coward's play is an escapist comedy about a man whose two previous wives return to haunt him.

"A minor comic masterpiece of the lighter sort" Professor Allardyce Nicoll

About this title

About the Author

Noël Coward was born in 1899 in Teddington, Middlesex. He made his name as a playwright with The Vortex (1924), in which he also appeared. His numerous other successful plays included Fallen Angels (1925), Hay Fever (1925), Private Lives (1933), Design for Living (1933) and Blithe Spirit (1941). During the war he wrote screenplays such as Brief Encounter (1944) and In Which We Serve (1942). In the fifties he began a new career as a cabaret entertainer. He published volumes of verse and a novel (Pomp and Circumstance, 1960), two volumes of autobiography and four volumes of short stories: To Step Aside (1939), Star Quality (1951), Pretty Polly Barlow (1964) and Bon Voyage (1967). He was knighted in 1970 and died three years later in Jamaica.

Edition details

• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0413771970
• ISBN 13: 9780413771971
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 144