Blithe Spirit,a review

I hope I don’t spoil the play for those who haven’t seen it; I hope my thoughts will make you want to see it. Plays are mirrors of our souls, and great mirrors are hung on our culture’s walls and polished up for continued viewing decade after decade. Look how long Shakespeare’s mirrors have been viewed.

Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit can have any meaning you want it to have. It can be just a great laugh, or it can crack open the mystery of your own psyche,—but with a laugh and not terror. This play is the story of the man who is haunted by the spirit of his past wife and dominated by his present wife. In Carl Jung’s terms, they represent the two female archetypes of the male psyche, the petulant childish temptress and the controlling mother. Our male character is haunted by both, bouncing helplessly between the two like a throw doll. He is attracted to both and repelled by both. As long as he is enthralled by either, his consciousness is not whole.

Archetypes are the other side of our psyche, the hidden side, the female side for the male, the male side for the female, and instead of integrating them and letting them live through us, we caste them out into the relationships in our lives and do battle with them there. So Blithe Spirit is a battle zone of our psyche as we each struggle to bring our opposites home.

There is resolution in the end and hope for our beleagued psyche as it struggles to transcend the inner inconsistencies of our nature. As Shakespeare said, our life is a play and all the people we meet and struggle with are but the characters we have invented so we can get to a curtain call, receive our applause and live with ourselves happily ever after.