Blithe Spirit starring Jennifer Saunders returns to West End
© Nobby Clark
Jennifer Saunders will star in the West End return of Noël Coward's classic comedy Blithe Spirit, which comes to London in September.
Directed by Richard Eyre, the production was first seen at Theatre Royal Bath as part of its 2019 summer season, before a UK tour and short run of just 12 performances at the West End's Duke of York's Theatre before the country's first lockdown.
It will now return to the West End for eight weeks from 16 September at the Harold Pinter Theatre.
Saunders will revive her role as the preposterous clairvoyant Madame Arcati. She is joined by original cast members Geoffrey Streatfeild who will star as Charles Condomine, Lisa Dillon as Ruth Condomine, Simon Coates as Dr Bradman, Lucy Robinson as Mrs Bradman, and Rose Wardlaw as Edith.
The production features design by Anthony Ward, lighting by Howard Harrison, sound by John Leonard and illusions by Paul Kieve.
Written in 1941, Coward's ever-popular comedy centres on novelist Charles Condomine and his second wife Ruth, who are literally haunted by a past relationship when an eccentric medium inadvertently conjures up the ghost of his first wife, Elvira, at a séance. When she appears, visible only to Charles, and determined to sabotage his current marriage, life – and the afterlife – get complicated.
Jennifer Saunders is well known as one half of the comedy duo French and Saunders, for which she and Dawn French received a BAFTA fellowship in 2009, and for the hit comedy series and subsequent film, Absolutely Fabulous, which she also wrote and starred in.
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