The White Carnation was specifically written for Ralph Richardson by R C Sherriff, author of Journey’s End, still the best known British play about World War 1. A ghost role would have appealed to Richardson. The play didn’t do that well and it hasn’t been seen since 1953. The revival is well-acted. A wealthy stockbroker (Aden Gillett) and his wife are celebrating Christmas with some friends during World War 2 when the house is hit by a doodlebug and they are all killed. 7 years later the stockbroker is still in his dinner-jacket with a white carnation in his button-hole. He is amazed to learn that he is dead and that the local council doesn’t want a ghost haunting the bombed house and is determined to get rid of him so that they can pull it down and build a block of flats in its place. He, however, refuses to disappear and decides to catch up on classical music and read all the books he had ignored when he was alive.
Sherriff has some gentle satire at the expense of bureaucracy trying to deal with a ghost. The coroner (Robert Benfield) tries to bribe him to leave by offering him a ruined castle with moat, drawbridge, battlements, dungeons and secret passages, an ideal place to haunt. The vicar (Benjamin Whitrow) won’t exorcise him because he is not an evil spirit. The Home Office maintains that once you are dead you cease to be a British citizen and that you need a permit to stay in the country and if you haven’t got a permit, you can be deported. Why has the ghost come back, anyway? Is it to set things right? When he was alive he had been only interested in making money. The denouement owes something to JB Priestley’s Dangerous Corner.