Angela Lansbury is known to cinemagoers for the ruthless communist in Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, to television viewers for the detective novelist in Murder She Wrote, to Broadway theatergoers for the title role in Mame and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd and to British theatergoers for Gypsy in which she played Gypsy Rose Lee’s ambitious mother. Her singing and acting of Stephen Sondheim’s lyrics, especially the dramatic “Momma Won’t Let Go,” was one of the great performances of the musical stage.
40 years on Lansbury is back in the West End and, at 88 years young, is playing Madame Arcati, the eccentric bicycle-riding medium (based on the novelist and playwright, Clemence Dane). It is not the leading role but it is the role everybody remembers. Noel Coward wrote it specifically for Margaret Rutherford. Lansbury’s performance, apart from a very funny dance Arcati does to get in the right mood for spiritualism, is particularly notable for its seriousness and understatement.
Coward’s improbable farce, one of his most popular plays, was written in five days during World War 2 at the height of the Blitz and produced six weeks later. The Church disapproved of its flippancy; but its phenomenal wartime success (1,997 performances) was precisely because it did take a flippant view of mortality and because it also held out a hope of life after death and reunion with loved ones. It might be interesting to revive the play in its wartime setting. The audience at its premiere in 1941 in order to get to the theatre had to walk across planks placed over the rubble caused by an air raid.
Coward always took great pride in the fact that there were no alterations once it was typed and that he had to cut only four lines. The situation of a man haunted firstly by one dead wife and then two dead wives is excellent but it takes too long to set up. The comedy feels witty, yet is actually short on witty lines and would benefit from cutting. There is a lot of dead wood in between the repartee and roguish flippancy.
Charles Edwards, a stylish actor, has the look of a “wounded spaniel” who has always been dominated by women. The idea of a ménage à trois only momentarily appeals; in truth, he would much prefer to be shot of them both. With her harsh, blonde helmet hair-style, her bright red lips, and clothed all in white, Jemima Rooper is a solid ghost and not as diaphanous as Coward might have wished for the sly, irresponsible and incorrigibly selfish Elvira. It might have been better if Rooper and Janie Dee, playing the second wife, had swapped roles.