For many years it has been my ambition to direct Blithe Spirit and I was delighted to have been offered the opportunity by Julia Schafranek.

Although it was written in 1941, Blithe Spirit looks back very much to the 1930s and this is our setting tonight.

During this period there was a popular interest in spiritualism and psychic research, which Coward cleverly utilises in his play. Coward himself had a strong interest in the supernatural, although he remained sceptical about the subject. He was intrigued by clairvoyance and in fact his own brilliant future had been foretold in this way.

Blithe Spirit is one of Coward’s greatest plays: a witty and beautifully constructed piece which never fails to entertain, with its original storyline and array of bizarre and intriguing characters. Amazingly, Coward managed to write the script over the course of only a few days, while on holiday in Wales. He later reported that the words flowed in an almost unbroken stream of consciousness and the finished text required hardly any alteration:

“I shall 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.”

The play originally ran in London’s West End for four and a half years, and since that time it has rarely been out of production – reproduced in theatres all over the world.

I hope that tonight we do justice to Coward’s genius and that you enjoy our production of Blithe Spirit as much as we have enjoyed working on it.

Philip Dart