Perth Voice Interactive

PLAYS where the understudy upstages the star are legend, but what about being called in cold with just a couple of days to learn your lines?

Like the spirits her character Madame Arcati conjures during a seance, Alison van Reeken rose to the occasion when replacing Roz Hammond, who’d stepped aside due to illness.

Popping through the magnificent red velvet curtains of the State Theatre, director Jeffrey Jay Fowler received a round of applause as he asked for the audience’s understanding that van Reeken—who’d had mere days to learn her lines for Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, would be waving a script about.

She may have needed the paper as a prompt but van Reeken’s theatrical timing was perfect as the over-the-top medium, and at times the script was more a prop to her eccentric character than an aide-memoire.

Hero of the play, the cool, urbane, Charles Condomine, (played by Adam Booth), holds a seance as research for a thriller he’s writing about a homicidal medium.

But Mme Arcati inadvertently conjures the spirit of his first wife Elvira, whom only Charles can see and hear.

With skin an ethereal white, and clothing a matching non-colour Jo Morris is light hearted, and coyly manipulating, as she declares she’s here to stay, cuddling up to her husband for a little post-death loving.

Condomine is looking rather pleased with himself the next morning, but his living wife Ruth, played with perfect, sophisticated coolness by Adriane Daff, is furious, thinking her husband had been shouting at her when he’d called Elvira a “little guttersnipe”.

“Blithe Spirit is a comedy about warring wives, laughter, magic and mayhem and is an hilarious and fantastical comedy about astral bigamy,” Black Swan artistic director Kate Cherry says.

Written more than 70 years ago, Coward’s humour shines through the years in this wicked farce about relationships.

And Ella Hetherington almost steals the show with her comic performance as the simple but try-hard maid, Edith.

Blithe Spirit is on at the State Theatre until August 9.

by JENNY D’ANGER