spirits, sufis, soulpepper

When the last dervish quietly walked offstage at Roy Thomson Hall Friday night, a cool silence decended for a moment before the applause began.

The sema was over, the whirling had stopped, time to go back outside to mundane reality.

Beautiful as the Sufi religious ceremony was, my companion turned to me and wondered aloud if it wouldn't have been more spiritual of us to go see soul singer Jully Black, who had been singing at the Mod Club that same night.

I mean, does the Profound always have to be accompanied by such poe-faced joyless solemnity? Is the spiritual always so serious?

I turned this question around in my mind seeing Blithe Spirit lastnight.

The final play of Soulpepper's 2007 season, it positively brims with laughter and joy. Believe me, your face will start to hurt from smiling -and that's a good kind of hurt, particularly these days.

Noel Coward has always been thought of as a souffle-light sort of playwright -the guy with the velvet robe and cigarette holder, martini in hand, writing witty plays about smartly-dressed people who natter away about nothing in particular.

And yet, I thought, it takes a deft hand to take an essentially unpleasant situation (intrusions of the past on present situations) and make it... funny.

CBC Radio's Mary Hynes explored the idea of God having a sense of humour in an interview with Rumi interpreter Coleman Barks earlier this year. Barks had said that laughter was how God expressed his humour, that through the joyful, shared expression of laughing, God expresses delight with his creation.

In light of this, it's fascinating to see a company like Soulpepper -who, in nearing a decade old, have been more noted for producing tragedies than comedies -choose to end their ninth season with Noel Coward, and flavour much of their tenth with comedy too.

Says something about the power of laughter, I'd wager.

Morris Panych's brilliant production has definitely kept the laughs of Blithe Spirit intact, but has wisely chosen not to soften the nasty edges either.

Coward's play centers around the mayhem created in the lives of Charles and Ruth Condomine, when the ghost of Charles' first wife, Elvira, is inadvertently summoned by Madame Arcati during a seance designed to provide writing material for Charles' latest novel.

Issues of jealousy, possessiveness, trust, deceit, identity and responsibility are all cleverly woven into the text, and Panych has no problems in bringing out these themes through deft timing, pitch-perfect performances, and a brilliantly gorgeous design scheme.

While the world of the Condomines is staid in shades of black, white, and grey, Elvira enters from the spirit world as some kind of blazing she-demon, complete with fiery red bob & glammy orange-red outfit to match. It's clear that, while ethereal, she aims to set Charles' thin veneer of marital bliss alight with her wicked observations & hot temper.

Fiona Reid, who I remember being so lovable onstage in Hay Fever years ago, here delivers a perfect performance that seamlessly blends elements of pathos and comedy; her Ruth is both cloyingly conventional and yet endearingly sympathetic.

As her rival, Brenda Robins delivers a deliciously bitchy performance that has elements of imperious haughtiness & saucy sensuality; she might be behind some awful actions (both in life and death), but you can't help but like her. Mannered and yet modern at the same time, her Elvira is the sort of woman you want to swap cocktail recipes and dish on men with.

As Charles, Joseph Ziegler moves from obedient to dithering to cruel to sympathetic, all the while alternating between outrage and embarassment over his apparent willing emasculation at the hands of what he sees as two Gorgons (both redheads, no less) out to turn him to stone. And he makes it funny all the while. Wow.

Nancy Palk's Madame Arcati is all bulgy-eyed drama & flailing limbs; in a role that could easily be mugged and mannered, Palk is all sincere dedication and passion. When she flips out a leg at awakening, or skips across the stage to turn on the record player, it fits with the character, and is believable, in every sense.

So, too, the perfect marriage of physical and mental is perfectly realized in Melody A. Johnson's hilarious performance as Edith, the maid with the spider walk who is weaving more than polite manners.

Amidst the laughs, however, it wasn't hard to see the sharp nasty edges of marital woe which Panych has wisely allowed to sit in a sort of uncomfortable, if insightful, juxtaposition with the more comedic elements. He trusts his actors, and the text, to let the moments speak for themselves. And speak they do.

This production of Blithe Spirit underlines the notion that whatever you don't deal with in your past will always come back to haunt you, manifest itself in different ways, and keep reappearing, until you deal with it. Talk about your karmic whirling.

The problem -and the comedy, Coward suggests -is that people being people, keep perpetuating their own cow poop by running away from the responsibility, drowning themselves with drink, movies, art, affairs, the occult, politics... take your pick.

It's ridiculous, it's hilarious, and it's true.

Like dervishes whirling in their circles, the power of comedy suggests the comedy of the cyclical, divine in its own right -and whether it's Dante and his rings of hell, Wilde's witty repartee, or Coward's making the past the present and the present the past, there is a divine force at work that brings people together under the umbrella of human experience.

As Rumi wrote, "the core of the seen and unseen universe smiles, but... smiles come best from those who weep."

Blithe Spirit runs at The Young Centre until December 15.
For more information, go to www.soulpepper.ca