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Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World @ the National Portrait Gallery

From the Sitwells to the Rolling Stones…

Introduction

Cecil Beaton (1904 to 1980) was a phenomenon. He made himself into the leading fashion photographer of his day, but that was far from being his only achievement: he was also a fashion illustrator, a painter, a writer of fashion essays and books (34 books in total), a social caricaturist, a serious wartime photographer, a costume and set designer for theatre and the movies, while all the time keeping one of the classic celebrity diaries of the century (at his death he left no fewer than 143 diaries which were published in 6 handsome volumes).

But the core of his achievement was the forty years he spent as a leading figure in fashion photography and that’s what this grand exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery focuses on. Aptly titled ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’, it is the first exhibition to exclusively explore Beaton’s pioneering contributions to fashion photography.

It’s designed to be a landmark show, with some 250 items on display, mostly wonderful photos but also including Beaton’s:

  • drawings
  • illustrations
  • magazine covers
  • a youthful home movie he and friends made of fooling around
  • several painted portraits of him by artist friends
  • and, in display cases:
    • a handsome collection of first editions of 20 or so of his books
    • the actual Kodak camera he did his early work on
    • the Oscar he won for ‘My Fair Lady’

1920s and ’30s

After the Second World War Beaton spent more time doing set and stage design, and in America working in Hollywood. It’s from this period that date the many classic portraits of notable actors and artists and, in particular, of Hollywood stars from the 1950s and ’60s, which many of us are familiar with. These are regularly shown in exhibitions with titles like ‘Cecil Beaton: Portraits’ but that’s not what this one is about. This one really does focus on his fashion photography and related work (illustrations, covers, books) and so has lots of his photos for Vogue magazine from 1927 to 1937, depicting upper-middle class debutantes and society ladies in wonderfully elaborate outfits against ornately staged backdrops, none of whom we’ve heard of and will ever hear of again.

Princess Emeline De Broglie by Cecil Beaton (1928) Gelatin silver print, The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Thus the very first room hosts 16 very big silver gelatin prints which survive from the landmark exhibition of Beaton portraits which the National Portrait Gallery held back in 1968. The curators point out that it was the first such show accorded a living photographer and helped to cement his reputation as ‘the finest arbiter of taste of the twentieth century’. And these 16 big black-and-white portraits are, indeed, stunning in composition and execution. But what I’m saying is they’re all of people you and I have never heard of: society figures from the 1920s and ’30s who are long forgotten. For example:

  • Sita Devi, Princess Karam of Kapurthala, 1935
  • The Honourable Mrs Richard Norton (Jean Norton), late 1920s
  • Paula Gellibrand, the Marquesa de Casa Maury, 1928
  • Mrs Harrison Williams (Mona Williams), 1936
  • Hazel, Lady Lavery, late 1920s
  • Mrs Robert H. McAdoo (Lorraine McAdoo), 1934
  • Lady Sylvia Ashley, 1934
  • Mrs Allan Ryan, Junior (Janet Ryan), 1929
  • Doris, Viscountess Castlerosse, 1932

A few leading actors are included (the beautiful young Vivienne Leigh) but the Hollywood celebs, for the most part, come a lot later.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing three portraits from the first room recreating of the 1968 show: note the elaborate paper-cut roses on the wall, echoing Beaton’s classic floral backgrounds (photo by the author)

Beaton’s beginnings

After this introductory room of greatest hits from the 1920s, The show is laid out in a straightforward chronological order. It starts with Cecil being born the son of a prosperous timber merchant in Hampstead. He had two sisters (Nancy and Barbara aka ‘Baba’) who appear in his earliest photos, as well as photos of his mother, Etty. After prep and public school, he got a place at Cambridge, where he studied history, art and architecture but wasn’t very academically minded and put most of his energy into theatre and the Footlights Revue.

The early rooms contain photos of his two glamorous sisters, Cambridge friends and society contacts. These include a wonderful picture of the artist Rex Whistler posing as a character from a Watteau painting. We learn that this was one of a series of tableaux en fête champêtre (‘pictures from a country festival’), a homage to the stylised paintings of Lancret, Watteau and Fragonard held at Wilsford Manor, Stephen Tennant’s family home, which Cecil organised in the summer of 1927. Next to it is a large portrait of Stephen Tennant, brightest of the Bright Young Things.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing the big portrait of a young Stephen Tennant

It’s in this room that the home movie is showing. It was made at Weirbridge Cottage near Savay Farm, Denham, in Buckinghamshire, the country home of the Mosley family and featured Bright Young Things such as Teresa ‘Baby’ Jungman, Georgia Sitwell, John Strachey, and the ubiquitous Tennant.

The point is Beaton’s ambition and determination. His parents were affluent enough to send him to private school and Cambridge but the rest was up to him and so he became a networker of genius. He managed to be taken up by all the important cultural circles of the day, namely: 1) Lady Ottoline Morell, the famous hostess of artists and writers at her country house, Garsington Manor, 2) the Sitwells, led by the poetess Edith Sitwell.

Charming, clever, charismatic, ambitious, talented, Beaton made friends and contacts wherever he went and people were flattered to be photographed by him. So in this room are photos of Lady Ottoline and some of her circle, of Edith and her brothers Sacheverell and Osbert. He is quoted as saying he learned an immense amount about posh upper-class manners and taste from his stays at Sacheverell’s country house at Weston Hall, Northamptonshire. Study, copy, rise.

Originally taken for the larks, Beaton’s photographs of Tennant and his circle now have considerable historical value, being considered some of the best representations of the Bright Young People of the twenties and thirties.

What comes over from all these wonderful black-and-white shots is the extent to which modernist art had been assimilated into the culture, especially in the 1920s. The tranquil rural settings of the Watteau homages are the exceptions because most of the photos are highly stylised interiors, taken against often striking Art Deco backgrounds, which make the photos works of art in themselves, as in the striking polka dot backdrop for Princess Emeline De Broglie, above. Here’s an installation view showing half a dozen of his wonderfully stylised 1920s and ’30s portraits. Note the striking modernist backdrops, the lovely outfits and the dramatic poses.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery

One modernist technique he used to dramatic effect was deploying multiple exposures. There are one or two examples here, although not the famous masterpiece, his portrait of Nancy Cunard.

Cecil’s self-creation

Part of Beaton’s ambition to get into the best social and artistic circles of the day was the drive to invent himself, to curate, mould and promote his own image. One result was that, over the years, a huge number of photos were taken of Beaton himself, a large number of artful self portraits but also portraits by other snappers, especially in his post-war celebrity period. The curators boast that the National Portrait Gallery alone holds 360 portraits of Beaton, by some of the most celebrated practitioners ranging from Man Ray to Richard Avedon, Dorothy Wilding to David Bailey, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Irving Penn and Arnold Newman. And so the exhibition includes photos of:

  • Cecil play-acting as King Cnut
  • Cecil outside the Excelsior Hotel, Venice
  • Cecil in Room 1806 at the Ambassador Hotel, New York
  • Cecil dressed up as the popular novelist Elinor Glyn
  • Cecil on the Menai Suspension Bridge
  • Cecil in RAF photographer’s uniform, the Western Desert
  • Cecil and Truman Capote in Tangier
  • Cecil and Audrey Hepburn on the set of My Fair Lady
  • Cecil looking grand in a cloak by the great American photographer Irving Penn in 1950

And many more.

Cecil’s stagings

I thought the single most important piece of information in the exhibition was the curators’ own observation that Beaton was never known as a highly skilled technical photographer. Instead, he focused on staging a compelling model or scene.

At school, university and after there’s plenty of evidence that he loved the theatre, loved staging plays and performances (the home movie, the Watteau series), loved not just acting in them but costume and set designing. Indeed, it was not just photography alone but his ability to make designs for the charity galas staged by fashionable London society, which boosted his reputation among the rich and titled. Here’s an installation view showing three of his photo portraits from a 1930s charity ball, which demonstrate just how elaborate these settings could be, almost dwarfing the human subjects. Note the mad profusion of flowers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery (photo by the author)

Once this talent for dressing a set is explained you see it everywhere. We are told that Beaton owned a couple of trunks full of props and spent a lot of time dressing and arranging the set or backdrop before he got around to the person or model to be shot. In so many of the shots it’s the dress and costume the sitter is wearing (this is fashion, after all) that has a lot to do with it – but what made it so Beaton would be the elaborateness or artfulness of the backdrops.

And so this is what a lot of the photos here consist of: classic debutante and society shots from the ’20s and ’30s – tall, elegant ladies in stunningly beautiful dresses, against stylishly imaginative backdrops. Here’s a photo which demonstrates both his flair for self-presentation and an example of his elaborate and stylish backdrops, in a self-portrait from the 1930s. See what I mean by ornate and elaborate backdrops. And flowers. Lots of cut flowers.

Cecil Beaton (c.1935) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

The sources of Cecil’s style

Almost entirely self-taught, Beaton established a highly distinctive photographic style which combined 1) Edwardian stage portraiture, 2) hints of contemporary European surrealism, 3) the more modernist approach of the great American photographers of the era, all filtered through 4) a pointedly English sensibility. The more I looked the more this ‘English sensibility’ could be summarised as lots of flowers.

Once you’ve recognised these elements, you can see how the mix varied in different shots or periods. For example, the portraits of his arty friends (the BYTs, the Sitwells) use a European modernist sensibility, all Art Deco lines and geometric backdrops, whereas the debutante balls are all English roses (lots and lots of roses). When, in the 1950s, he did Hollywood film stars, there are a few staged settings but most are shot in a more American, democratic, unstaged way. The famous portraits of Elizabeth Taylor or Marilyn Monroe are all about capturing (supposedly) unstaged and natural moments.

Elizabeth Taylor by Cecil Beaton (1955) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

Reflecting on this, you realise that being invited to do the costume and set design for the Broadway musical, and then for the movie version, of ‘My Fair Lady’ was a dream come true for Beaton, because it is a costume drama, a period piece, set in his beloved Edwardian era, but heightened and stylised through a 20th century sensibility. The outfit and backdrop in the photo below, for instance. They have the feel and apparent shape of an Edwardian outfit, but the details of the dress design, and especially the receding square of the backdrop, owe more to the 1960s Op Art of Bridget Riley than the 1900s world of Edward Elgar.

Audrey Hepburn in costume for ‘My Fair Lady’ by Cecil Beaton (1963) The Cecil Beaton Archive, London

Beaton and British Vogue

Cecil managed to sell his first photo to British Vogue while still an undergraduate and signed a contract with them in 1927. For the next decade he worked as a staff photographer for Vogue and the core of the exhibition is lots of work from this period. This includes not just fashion shoots but illustrations and covers.

Regarding the illustrations, about half a dozen are on show here, all of them are good, and some of them are sublime. Obviously it’s fashion with its eternal body fascism, so all the women are immensely tall with unfeasibly long necks but, if you enter that world, those are the rules.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ at the National Portrait Gallery showing one of Beaton’s many fashion drawings: note the extreme thinness and elongation of the models;  in fashion, everything changes and yet nothing changes

Vogue covers

More light is shed on Beaton’s strengths and weaknesses in the matter of magazine covers. You’d have expected the young genius to have supplemented his elaborate fashion shoots with umpteen cover shoots for Vogue but, surprisingly, no. Very few of his classic shots made it onto the cover of Vogue. This was, apparently, because he was too opinionated to submit to the requirements of art directors who needed to arrange images to have lots of text imposed over them. Cecil wouldn’t play ball. So surprisingly few covers.

Installation view of ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ showing the display case of holding some of his (relatively few) magazine covers (photo by the author)

Cecil’s antisemitism

Then disaster struck. In 1937, for reasons he could not immediately explain, as he put the finishing touches to a finely-detailed decorative border to a double-page illustration for Vogue, Beaton added in tiny writing an antisemitic slur – basically, he used the k word. Though almost microscopic, it did not go unnoticed. 130,000 copies of the early February 1938 edition were pulped as the magazine’s editors fielded a backlash from  advertisers who threatened a boycott. Condé Nast forced Beaton’s resignation from Vogue. Beaton’s humiliation was sudden and total. Then again, this is the world of fashion. Two years later, partially rehabilitated by the seriousness of his war photography (see below), Vogue rehired him.

The Royals

In 1939, much to his own surprise, Beaton was invited to Buckingham Palace to photograph Queen Elizabeth, wife of the reigning monarch, George VI. Only two years earlier he had potentially alienated the Royals by doing portraits of the two figures at the heart of the scandal which rocked the family, the 1936 Abdication Crisis, namely Edward Prince of Wales and the American divorcee he fell in love with, Wallis Simpson. His 1937 portraits of them are here and very impressive, too, especially Wallis in a striking black and white Schiaparelli jacket.

But despite having taken stylish photos of the Royals’ enemy, he was now invited into the heart of the establishment, to take photos of the loyal Royals, and this was to open up a whole new aspect of his career. Queen Elizabeth (who was to become the Queen Mother) was charming, her husband mild and unassuming, and he took various sets of them. But over the  next decade or more it was their daughter, the young Princess Elizabeth, who stole the show, who emerged from girlhood into young maturity and be captured in a series of photoshoots. Beaton was the official photographer for her coronation (2 June 1953), and captured the growth of her young family. There’s a great shot of her with the toddler Prince Charles.

Meanwhile, her sister, the more fashionable and flirtatious Princess Margaret, was also given the Beaton treatment, but in a more stylish and elegant manner than her more homely sister. Beaton’s long association with the Royals, during which he helped to mould their public image, has been the subject of more than one exhibition and numerous books.

War photographer

If Beaton’s reputation was dented by the antisemitism scandal, it was in part rehabilitated by the advent of war in September 1939. He was recruited into the Ministry of Information and tasked with creating propaganda photos. At first these focused on the Home Front, especially during the Battle of Britain (10 July until 31 October 1940) and the Blitz (7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941). This section of the show features a fashionably dressed young woman set against a completely bombed-out London building.

But the star of the section is the iconic photo Beaton took of 3-year-old Blitz victim Eileen Dunne recovering in hospital, clutching her beloved teddy bear. When the image was published, America had not yet joined the war, but images like this did much to create the climate of public opinion in the States favourable to lending Britain arms and materiel.

The Men Who Fly Planes by Cecil Beaton (1941) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive, London

I haven’t really brought out Beaton’s work rate. You don’t become the leading fashion photographer of your age by accident. It took a lot of hard work, ambition and commitment, honing your craft, maintaining contacts and delivering the goods. And the point of mentioning this now is that when the war came, Beaton applied the same commitment and work rate to his war work. At first on the domestic subjects of the Blitz and air battle but, once it was possible, he travelled beyond Britain to other theatres of war, to document all aspects of the war effort: from the shipyards of Tyneside to the Middle East and then the Far East to record the war against Japan.

In total Beaton took some 7,000 photographs for the Ministry of Information covering all aspects of the Second World War, and produced an impressive ten books with titles like ‘History Under Fire’ and ‘Air of Glory’. Like so many other aspects of Beaton’s career this one, too, has been the subject of an exhibition, held, appropriately enough, at the Imperial War Museum.

So much so that I wondered: why is there a whole section devoted to Beaton’s war photography in an exhibition about fashion?

Two country homes: Ashcombe and Reddish

The exhibition takes another digression away from purely fashion shoots to devote a room to Beaton’s two homes. From 1930 to 1945, Beaton leased Ashcombe House in Wiltshire. It was a small, elegant house, undisturbed for years and Beaton lavished years of care, decorating and adorning it with tasteful theatricality, and it became a venue for hosting his many friends in the arts.

Unfortunately, when the lease expired in 1945 it couldn’t be renewed, so he was bereft for a few years. Then, in 1947, he discovered Reddish House, a ‘miniature Queen Anne jewel-box of a house’, set in a couple of acres of gardens, a few miles east of the village of Broad Chalke.

Here he transformed the interior, adding rooms on the eastern side, extending the parlour southwards, and introducing many new fittings. Once again, it became a venue for visitors, friends and celebrities, not least his sometime inamorata, Greta Garbo (the very improbable affair between Beaton and Garbo lasted from 1946 to 1960). Grand personages for a quiet English backwater. Beaton remained at the house until his death in 1980 and is buried in the parish church graveyard.

State and film design

In Britain, the end of the war saw a continuation of rationing and austerity. The most obvious change in Beaton’s world was the advent of colour photography. During the 1930s colour image making was a labour-intensive exercise and Beaton wasn’t fond of it. Technological advancements in colour reproduction had been led by The Condé Nast Publications at its state-of-the-art printing works outside New York so that Vogue was at the cutting edge. The curators claim that Beaton made some of his most
impressive fashion photographs in colour, usually within his trademark stylised format. Frankly, I’m not so sure.

The room of post-war colour photos seemed to me by far the weakest. His colour photos lack the style, precision and thrilling modernity of the black and white ones. I can think of no better way of saying it than that the subjects in the 1920s and ’30s black-and-white images look like flawless gods and legends whereas the people in his colour photos look like people, freckles and skin blemishes and all. Here’s one of his solo colour portraits from just after the war. Nicely staged and lit and everything, but… plain. Amazing dress, lovely little bouquets etc… But lacking any oomph.

At the Tuxedo Ball (Nancy Harris) by Cecil Beaton (1946) The Condé Nast Archive, New York

He’s a lot better when he can arrange his figures into the kind of idealised, stylised Edwardian drawing room ambience which became his post-war brand, as here, less close-up, more stylised. Like a set design.

Worldly Colour (Charles James evening dresses) by Cecil Beaton (1948) The Cecil Beaton Studio Archive

Designer for stage and screen

Possibly this is why his post-war career took a detour away from photography back towards his first love of the stage, costumes and theatrical design. Immediately after the war, in 1946, he designed sets, costumes and lighting for a 1946 revival of Lady Windermere’s Fan, in which he also acted. Eight years later, in 1956, he won plaudits for the costumes he designed for Alan Jay Lerner (lyricist and librettist) and Frederick Loewe (composer)’s musical play ‘My Fair Lady’. The association led to the invitation to be designer to the Lerner and Loewe film musical, ‘Gigi’, in 1958. And then, the climax of his career, to design costumes for the award-winning movie version of the play, ‘My Fair Lady’, released in 1964. Astonishingly, Beaton won an Academy Award for Best Costume Design for both these movies.

The last room in the exhibition is devoted to Beaton’s designs for and photos of the stars of ‘My Fair Lady’, not least a montage of shots of the incomparable Audrey Hepburn, along with a couple of the original star of the stage production, Rex Harrison, and the young actress who made the part onstage but was dropped in favour of Hepburn, Julie Andrews (note the roses).

Celebrities

As mentioned, before the war it’s mostly debutante and fashion photos of the 1920s and ’30s are of people we’ve never heard of (apart from the Royals). It’s after the war, when he went to work in America, that Beaton started shooting celebrity actors and performers in large numbers. Thus the exhibition includes memorable portraits of:

  • John Wayne
  • Gary Cooper
  • Fred Astaire
  • Katherine Hepburn
  • Buster Keaton
  • Johnny Weismuller
  • Marlon Brando
  • Yul Brynner
  • Joan Crawford
  • Elizabeth Taylor
  • Marilyn Monroe

Artists:

  • Salvador and Gala Dali
  • Lucien Freud
  • Francis Bacon

Comments

1. Absence of analysis

Exhibition curator Robin Muir is quoted as saying ‘Beaton’s impact spans the worlds of fashion, photography and design.’ OK. Why? How? Explain what lasting impact he had on 1) fashion, 2) photography, 3) design. What, exactly, were his, say, three major innovations in photography?

I was surprised at the lack of analysis of any of this. Blank assertion a-plenty – he was ‘one of the leading visionary forces of the British twentieth century’, he ‘made a lasting contribution to the artistic lives of New York, Paris and Hollywood’ and so on. Yes, but how exactly? In what way did he ‘mould the visual style between the wars’? Why exactly was he called ‘the King of Vogue’? What was it about his compositions or lighting, his arrangement of models and so on, that defined the age?

The wall captions overflow with names of all the sitters, who they were and who they married or divorced – there’s no end of celebrity tittle-tattle, so that much of the exhibition reads like a society gossip column from a hundred years ago:

Marjorie Seely Blossom (1890-1969) divided her time between New York, Palm Beach and Biarritz, where she cultivated a much-admired rose garden. In a letter to Beaton, Diana Vreeland praised Mrs Wilson as ‘the most divinely beautiful woman that ever was’.

Or:

Lady Mendl, the former Elsie de Wolfe (1865-1950), was married late in life and to the surprise of friends, to Sir Charles Mendl, press attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. They kept separate
residences but entertained together. An interior decorator of influence, Lady Mendl sits in the circular hall of her Paris home in a blue taffeta dress by Mainbocher. Beaton considered her ‘a woman of unquenchable vitality… a living factory of chic.’

There’s hundreds of miles of this stuff. But insights into the precise nature of Beaton’s innovations and discoveries, what his look consisted of and why it was so influential, or indeed an outline of the main developments in fashion during the 1920s and ’30s – disappointingly little.

2. Comparison with Lee Miller

It’s a happy coincidence that the Beaton exhibition (ends January 2026) is running in parallel with Tate Britain’s exhibition of another pioneering twentieth century photographer, Lee Miller (running until February 2026).

In a nutshell, I think Miller is incomparably the greater photographer and artist. While Beaton had a good eye as a photographer, Lee was a genius. Presumably the Beaton has been carefully curated to be the best of the best and so I was very surprised that quite a few of the photos were actually poor. Some seemed to fail the elementary test of being in focus. Many of the post-war colour images seemed to me clumsy and graceless.

Installation view of Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World at the National Portrait Gallery showing four of Beaton’s colour photos from the 1940s

Many of the debutante photos and, of course, the Royal portraits, are nice. Nicely composed, chaste and demure, cascades of roses complementing billowing dresses etc. I take the point that the style he developed took a lot of effort and flair and so on but they are all, essentially, conservative, in subject matter (all those posh debutantes) and feel and style. Beaton adapted the feeblest British aftershocks of surrealism into his vision, tame and well mannered.

By contrast, Miller went to the heart of the Parisian avant-garde, tracking down and buttonholing Man Ray and forcing herself to become his collaborator and lover. With him she developed dazzling new ways of seeing and using photography (notably the famous solarising technique). The nudes she did in the studio with Man Ray invented new types of beauty, took the concept of the nude to new places. Her surrealist shots of Paris street scenes are inspired. Her war photography was inspired. She not only had a dazzlingly good eye but was brave in the face of actual combat in a way most of us can’t imagine.

For all that Beaton is photographed smiling and larking around, his humour comes over very little in his actual work, whereas Lee Miller’s quirky surreal take on the world comes over in scores of her images.

Maybe Beaton’s concoction from various elements of a sort of modernised Edwardian elegance for the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s was very influential in his day, in fact for a generation – but it is, all of it, tame and contained and good mannered. While Miller blew the lid off photography not once but several times, with the searing intensity of genius.

I know they come from different worlds and are doing different things. ‘Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World’ is a very good, very interesting and very entertaining exhibition. But almost anything by Lee Miller blows it out of the water.

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Posted by Simon on November 8, 2025

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Blithe Spirit by Noel Coward (1941)

‘There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Mrs Condomine.’
(Madame Arcati the medium, humorously quoting Hamlet in Blithe Spirit, Act 2, scene 2)

Blithe Spirit, first staged in 1941, has turned out to be one of Noel Coward’s most popular and regularly revived plays. From my reading of half a dozen of the others I’d hazard a guess that this is because it’s actually about something. ‘Hay Fever’, ‘Easy Virtue’, ‘Private Lives’, ‘Design for Living’, ‘Present Laughter’ – if they’re about anything, it’s farcical arguments and misunderstandings based around people’s fractious love lives; whereas Blithe Spirit has an interesting and genuinely comic premise.

This is that a medium, one Madame Arcati, who a group of cynical upper middle-class types have invited round to hold a séance amid much joking and banter, turns out to everyone’s amazement to be real. There is an afterlife, the spirits of the dead do live on there, and people called mediums can get in touch with them.

But the comic premise goes further than that. The lead male character – witty, cynical Charles Condomine who hosts the séance – lost his first wife, Elvira, seven years ago (to be clear: she died: in a comic detail we are told she laughed so hard at a BBC radio programme that she dropped dead of a heart attack).

He has subsequently married the fragrant and sensible Ruth. But when the medium, Madame Arcati, succeeds in getting in touch with the ‘other world’, guess who’s waiting there to transmit a message to the living? His first wife, Elvira!

His first hint of it is when the medium’s ‘contact’, a girl called Daphne, insists on picking out the record of an Irving Berlin song, ‘Always’, to put on the gramophone to help set the mood. Charles starts a bit, because that was one of Elvira’s favourite songs. But then, once the lights are turned low and Madame Arcati has gone into a trance, Charles insists that he can hear Elvira talking to him, even though no-one else can.

This freaks him out so much that he leaps up and turns the lights on, to reveal Madame Arcati unconscious and flat on her back. To backtrack a bit and explain the plot more fully:

Brief synopsis

Act 1

Scene 1. Setup and arrival of the guests

Charles Condomine is a successful novelist. While dressing for dinner, he and his second wife, Ruth, discuss his first wife, Elvira, who died young, seven years earlier. They also fuss about the new maid, Edith, who is gauche and over-keen, always racing hither and thither and constantly having to be told to calm down and walk.

Charles has invited round for dinner a local couple, Dr and Mrs Bradman. When the guests assemble they make jokes about the third guest who hasn’t yet arrived, for Charles has invited a local eccentric, Madame Arcati, who claims to be a medium. He explains that he’s invited her in order to get background information and colour for a novel he’s planning to write about a fake medium. Madame Arcati arrives, all clattering ‘barbaric’ jewellery.

(As Philip Hoare points out in his excellent biography of Coward, the playwright’s lesbians are often dressed ‘barbarically’ i.e. in modernist necklaces, bangles, patterns and designs. In addition it is made to appear outlandishly eccentric that Madame A likes cycling everywhere. In addition she is given to schoolgirl pep talks: ‘mustn’t give up hope–chin up–never day die’. Coward is quoted in the Hoare biography as saying that as her part grew and grew as he thought up funnier and funnier aspects of her character.)

So now the guests are all assembled they settle down to dinner and the scene closes.

Scene 2. The séance

After dinner the characters prepare to hold the seance. The character of Madame Arcati and her preposterous profession are rich in comic details: such as how the best ‘contacts’ in the other world are children, although Indians are also good. Unless they get over-excited, in which case they go off ‘into their own tribal language’ and are unintelligible.

Madame Arcati’s contact is called Daphne and is ‘rising seven’ years old. Contacts respond well to music and Daphne has a fondness for the songs of Irving Berlin (Madame A drolly remarks that ‘She likes a tune she can hum’). Rifling through Charles’s collection, Madame comes across ‘Always’ by Berlin.

After a lot more palaver, as described above, Madame A raises the ghost of Elvira whose voice only Charles can hear. When he leaps to his feet and turns the lights on Madame A is unconscious on her back. The doctor helps bring her round and after further chat, she leaves. As she does so Elvira appears to us, onstage, dressed in grey with grey make-up on face and flesh, although not seen by anyone else. After some more sceptical chat, Dr and Mrs Bradman also leave.

So now there’s just Charles, Ruth and ghost Elvira onstage. What quickly emerges is that only Charles can see or hear Elvira. Elvira is exactly as selfish and imperious as she was in life and soon she and Charles are bickering like characters in all Coward’s other plays. The cleverness or conceit of this play is that Ruth can only hear Charles’s part of the dialogue. So when he says something rude and sharp to Elvira, Ruth thinks he’s talking to her and gets understandably upset and then cross.

So although the premise is novel enough, the actual meat of the play is like all Coward’s other plays in that the only way the characters can relate to each other is through arguing and bickering and telling each other to shut up.

  • CHARLES: Shut up.
  • CHARLES: Be quiet, Elvira.
  • RUTH: Stop talking like that, Charles.
  • CHARLES: Be quiet, she’s doing her best.
  • RUTH: Be quiet, you’ll ruin everything.
  • CHARLES: Do shut up darling, you’ll make everything worse.
  • CHARLES: Don’t be childish, Elvira.
  • ELVIRA: Don’t call me your child.
  • CHARLES: For heaven’s sake don’t snivel.
  • CHARLES: I’m sick of these insults, please go away.

ELVIRA: Oh Charles.
CHARLES: Shut up!

And Coward’s favourite word, idiotic.

  • RUTH: Charles, how can you be so idiotic?
  • RUTH: Sit down for God’s sake and don’t be idiotic.
  • CHARLES: How can I control myself in the face of your idiotic damned stubbornness?
  • CHARLES: Don’t be idiotic.
  • RUTH: And now, owing to your idiotic inefficiency, we find ourselves in the most mortifying position.

Coward is so aware of the issue that even he himself uses the word ‘bickering’ to describe everyone’s behaviour.

CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.

ELVIRA: When I think what might have happened if I’d succeeded in getting you to the other world after all – it makes me shudder, it does honestly… It would be nothing but bickering and squabbling for ever and ever and ever.

And all this bickering, as in all Coward’s other plays, tends towards what I’ve called the futility point, the moment when one or both participants in the argument just give up even trying to communicate to the other.

  • RUTH: It’s no use arguing any more.
  • CHARLES: It doesn’t matter, Ruth… We’ll say no more about it.
  • CHARLES: There is nothing to be gained by continuing this discussion.

So in this early phase of Elvira’s haunting the comedy, if it works as comedy, comes from Ruth’s bewilderment at Charles’s unexplained remarks, while there is equal comedy in Charles’s frustration at his inability to make Ruth understand or believe that his first wife has returned from the dead to haunt him.

RUTH: I am not going to stay here arguing any longer.
ELVIRA: Hooray!
CHARLES: Shut up!
RUTH [incensed]: How dare you speak to me like that!
CHARLES: Listen, Ruth, please listen.
RUTH: I will not listen tom any more of this nonsense. I am going up to bed now, I’ll leave you to turn out the lights. I shan’t be asleep – I’m too upset. So you can come in and say goodnight to me if you feel like it.
ELVIRA: That’s big of her, I must say.
CHARLES: Be quiet!

From this little excerpt you can see how what I’ve described as bickering isn’t an incidental feature of the dialogue, it is absolutely central to Coward’s method, the core of his idea of drama, and, if acted correctly, the source of most of the alleged comedy.

There is another thread of comedy which is that Elvira is comically banal and under-excited about being dead or the afterlife. We get no confirmation of whether there’s a heaven or hell, or the Big Question – whether there’s a God, and his Son is Jesus etc. None of that kind of detail. This is a comedy after all. Instead she talks like a blasé Mayfair cocktail party character, can’t really remember any of the details but has gossip about various characters in the afterlife. Thus we learn that Joan of Arc is really ‘a lot of fun’ while Merlin bores everyone with the same old party tricks. So the afterlife sounds exactly like a Noel Coward 1920s cocktail party.

Elvira has only the vaguest sense of where she was and thinks she’s appeared to haunt Charles because she was ‘summoned’ though he swears to her and Ruth that he never summoned anyone. This is an important plot point which we’ll return to.

Meanwhile, Ruth refuses to believe Elvira is there, is instead convinced that Charles is drunk and storms off to bed leaving Charles to recriminate with Elvira.

Act 2

Scene 1

The next morning at breakfast Ruth tells Charles he behave abominably to her the night before and was disgustingly drunk. As you might expect, this quickly degenerates into another Coward slanging match, with both spouses dragging up stories about flings or affairs they had with other people. Charles is given speeches declaring his exasperation with women and claims Ruth is always trying to boss him around (‘You boss and bully and order me about’). This is an important theme, maybe the central theme of the play, which has given rise to predictable accusations of misogyny (see below).

They carry on the argument through and after breakfast and are sitting in armchairs when Elvira walks in through the French windows. Charles is again shocked and starts arguing with Elvira, which Ruth misinterprets as more abuse of her until… Charles persuades Elvira to prove to Ruth that she exists. She does this by moving a bowl of flowers around the room to prove her existence. Ruth thinks it must be a trick, then becomes hysterical, fearing that she’s going mad, while Elvira picks up a chair and waltzes with it. When Ruth tries to escape through the French windows Elvira slams them in her face. When Elvira smashes a vase, Ruth goes into hysterics. End of scene 1.

Scene 2

Later the same day, Ruth has invited Madame Arcati to tea. She has accepted Elvira’s existence, to the extent of casually mentioning that her husband is off driving the ghost for an outing to Folkestone.

In the midst of a lot of banter it emerges that Ruth has invited Madame Arcati round with the simple wish of wanting her to get rid of Elvira, to send her back to ‘dematerialise’ her. But when Ruth admits that Charles didn’t believe she was a real medium and only invited her round to take notes on ‘the tricks of the trade’, offended Madame Arcati leaves in a huff.

Enter Charles and ghost Elvira. Ruth accepts and understands the distinction between when Charles is talking to her (Ruth) and when he’s talking to Elvira. In fact she asks questions of Elvira directly and asks Charles to report back her answers, which he does tactfully since many of Elvira’s replies are barbed and aggressive. When Ruth reports that Madame Arcati doesn’t think she can dematerialise Elvira, the latter crows in triumph: she will spend the rest of her life with her beloved Charles!

But the conversation degenerates and Ruth says next day she’s going up to London to the Psychical Research Society to see if they can help, and if they can’t she’ll go to see the Archbishop of Canterbury, and she slams out of the room (again).

Charles and Elvira have a relatively civilised conversation and he says he’s going off to dress for dinner and exits. The scene ends with some comic business when Elvira puts the record of ‘Always’ on the gramophone and is dancing round to it when Edith the gawky maid comes in, turns the gramophone off and files the record away, at which Elvira takes it out and puts it back on the gramophone – with the result that Edith runs out the room screaming.

Worth mentioning that this is a tried and tested Coward strategy, of having one song be repeatedly played and mentioned throughout a play, so that at the end of the evening the audience would come out humming it. In this play it’s Berlin’s song ‘Always’, compare Coward’s use of his own song, ‘Someday I’ll Find You’, in Private Lives.

Scene 3

A few days later, in the same drawing room, Ruth is talking to Mrs Bradman because the doctor has popped round to have a look at Charles’s arm, which he appears to have sprained. The doctor says he’s a bit worried about Charles because during his inspection, he kept letting fly irrelevant remarks. Of course Ruth and the audience know these were aimed at Elvira, of whose existence Dr B knows nothing. Also, Edith seems to have had an accident and fallen, on the same day.

At this point Charles enters with his arm in a sling. He’s insisting he drive into Folkestone but the doctor advises against it. Ruth knows the Folkestone trip is because Elvira wants to go to the cinema. Charles sees the doctor out while Elvira teases Ruth by throwing rose stems at her from a vase.

When Charles returns Ruth tells him she’s convinced Elvira is trying to kill him. This explains the recent accidents: Edith fell down the stairs and banged her head because the whole of the top stair was covered in axle grease, while Charles had the accident on the ladder which hurt his arm because the ladder had been sawed nearly in two. Why? So Charles will pass over into the spirit world and be Elvira’s forever.

Ruth convinces Charles she’s right and they are discussing what to do, whether Madame Arcati can do anything, when Elvira sweeps in again. Charles alerts Ruth to the fact, and they change the subject. Although she still can’t see or hear Elvira, Ruth tells her off for making her husband drive her to Folkestone that evening, and storms out (again).

Charles and Elvira engage in some more banter and bickering about how poor Ruth’s taste in household furnishing is etc. This is padding to cover time because when Elvira asks Charles can’t they go into Folkestone now, he casually says no, because Ruth’s taken the car to go and see the vicar.

At this news Elvira leaps out of her chair and becomes extremely agitated, repeating ‘Oh God oh God’. Charles begins to suspect something about the car, then suddenly realises that Elvira has sabotaged it. He is just accusing her of it when the phone rings. He picks it up and we only hear his side of the conversation but it’s something about an accident down by the bridge.

And at this moment the door swings open and Elvira steps back in horror, then shields her head from blows and cries out, ‘Ruth, stop it’.

Clearly 1) Elvira did sabotage the car 2) Ruth crashed it and was killed 3) she has ‘passed over’ and now exists on the same spectral plane as Elvira where 4) she is attacking her. And on this bombshell the scene ends.

It is an important plot point that the audience, and Charles, at this point cannot see Ruth. But there’s no doubt that she’s died and come back from the dead.

Act 3

Scene 1

It is a few days later. Presumably there’s been a funeral for Ruth etc. Charles is waiting by the fire and Madame Arcati is shown in. She offers her condolences but is spookily aware that Elvira had something to do with Ruth’s death. Elvira appears – note that even Madame Arcati can’t see her and has to have Charles point out to her where she is and what she’s saying.

Part of the comedy is that Madame Arcati is as gleeful as a child that Elvira has returned. She asks for proof and Elvira blows on her ear which makes Madame A cackle with pleasure.

Elvira, for her part, is fed up, she hates Ruth being on her plane because she’s endlessly taunting her. She now wants to be exorcised or dematerialised. Charles asks Madame A to step into the dining room for a moment because he wants to talk to Elvira. This, of course, turns into an argument, with them both taunting each other with the affairs they had during their marriage, she with Guy Henderson and Captain Bracegirdle, he with Cynthia Cheviot.

As this bickering makes them both really miserable Elvira begs Charles to call Madame Arcati back into the room., She comes and there’s a lot of palaver and stage business with salt and pepper and herbs as she lays everything out for her dematerialisation. She claims to be following a formula from Edmondson’s Witchcraft and its Byways.

She puts music on the gramophone, turns off the lights and asks her contact on the other side to tap the table for messages, but the tapping gets stronger and stronger until Madame Arcati falls over, pulling the table on top of her.

When Charles switches the lights on and pulls the table off her and revives Madame Arcati, he points out that Elvira is still here, nothing happened to her, but Madame Arcati insists that something happened, and at that moment the figure of Ruth, herself as grey as Elvira, sweeps in through the French windows. I think that up till this moment she had been an unearthly presence. So I think what’s happened is that Madame Arcati’s spell has backfired and fully invoked or materialised her to the same level as Elvira.

Now Charles has two angry ex-wives to cope with. End of scene.

Scene 2

It’s a few hours later and the room is in disarray with various objects (crystal ball, Ouija board) arranged to give the impression that a variety of further spells and incantations (‘the most humiliating hocus-pocus’) have been tried and all failed. Madame Arcati is fast asleep on the sofa.

The two women ghosts are exhausted and humiliated. They complain that they’ve had to sit through no fewer than five séances and innumerable spells and have completely failed to dematerialise.

What begins to develop or become clear is the division between Charles and the two women. Elvira and Ruth have buried the hatchet and are now in league against him, joining common cause in finding him boorish and unhelpful. And he finds himself outnumbered and exasperated with him. It’s now that he delivers what in one sense is the play’s defining line (and the defining line of so many Coward plays):

CHARLES: I wish you two would stop bickering for one moment.

So the ghosts goad Charles into waking Madam Arcati up for one last try. It is that this point that a key fact is discovered: All the women (Elvira, Ruth and Madame A) have been insisting it was Charles who called them into being: the two ghost women recall answering an overwhelming call for them to appear in the Condomine house. Suddenly Madame A has a brainwave. She grabs her crystal ball and sees something white, like a bandage. She scampers round, waves a bunch of garlic, makes cabbalistic signs and chants a spell.

And into the room comes Edith, the scatty servant. Wearing a white bandage round her head. She asks Charles why he called her but of course he didn’t – Madame Arcati did! At first she pretends she can’t see the two ghosts but soon makes a slip and they realise that she can. It was her. She has the gift. She is a Natural.

Madame Arcati swiftly hypnotises Edith and tells her she knows what she has to do i.e. reverse her call to Ruth and Elvira. So Madame A gets Edith to softly sing ‘Always’ (remember what I said about Coward cannily threading a theme song throughout many of his plays?) Sensing they are about to disappear, both Ruth and Elvira hurry to get in some last messages to Charles but their voices fade and then disappear.

Hooray! Madame A wakes Edith from her trance and Charles gives her a pound for her troubles. For a split second there is a moment of naughtiness, because Edith can’t remember how she got there or what’s just happened, and for a moment she misinterprets the pound to mean that she’s been taken advantage off and she runs out the room squealing.

Charles, rather like the confirmed misogynist Henry Higgins in Pygmalion, doesn’t understand, though the audience – or some of the audience – does.

Charles is hugely relieved and is effusively thanking Madame A when she utters words of caution. She tells him to pack his bags and leave. Why on earth? And Madame A explains that… they may still be here! Even though he can’t see or hear them… the house may still be haunted. She gives him a parting warning to pack his bags and go far away (while she herself is packing up all her paraphernalia) and then she takes her leave.

Charles is alone onstage, pondering. Tempting fate, he starts to talk to Elvira and Ruth, teasing them, telling them how happy he is to be free of them, and of women generally in his life. At which the vase on the mantelpiece falls to the floor. Of course! They are still here!

So: he takes the opportunity to let rip: first he tells Elvira that he knew about her affairs all along, what she didn’t know about was him and Paula Westlake! Then he turns to Ruth and says he was faithful to her but was being alienated by her increasingly domineering behaviour and it was only a matter of time… at which the clock strikes sixteen!

He bids them both goodbye as a sofa cushion is thrown at him, ducks it and tells them they’re welcome to smash up the house as much as they like – as the curtains are pulled up and down, the gramophone lid opens and shuts, the overmantel shakes. He eggs them on, telling Ruth to give Elvira a hand, as a statuette on the bookshelf falls down, and as he makes his amused exit all hell breaks loose, with vases falling, the curtains falling, the gramophone playing ‘Always’ speeded up, the overmantel collapsing, the curtain rod crashing down and anything else the director can think of.

THE END

Misogyny

In his biography Hoare quotes a woman director as saying the play is very funny but the ending reeks of misogyny. Certainly the last couple of pages where he delights in getting rid of the two ghosts, and then taunts them, have a certain fierceness. A series of remarks about being free of women climaxes with this little peroration.

CHARLES: You said in one of your more acid moments, Ruth, that I had been hag-ridden all my life! How right you were – but now I’m free Ruth dear, not only of Mother and Elvira and Mrs Winthrop Llewellyn, but free of you too and I should like to take this farewell opportunity of saying I’m enjoying it immensely!

Not Andrew Tate, is it, but it is the conclusion of a distinct trend in the play. Why does this play and not most of his others display this tone? Maybe it comes from something in Coward’s attitude. But maybe it’s simpler, maybe it’s simply the logical conclusion of the tendency of the of the characters, implicit in the initial setup, maybe Coward followed the logic of the basic scenario and Charles’s gratitude to be rid of the two haunters is comic vehemence.

Movie version

‘Blithe Spirit’ was promptly made into a movie, released in 1945, directed by David Lean who Coward had collaborated with on another adaptation of a recent play, ‘This Happy Breed’. The film starred two of the main actors from the original stage production, namely Kay Hammond as Elvira and Margaret Rutherford as Madame Arcati. Constance Cummings played Ruth and Rex Harrison stepped into Coward’s shoes to play Charles.

Out of the country during the filming, Coward was less happy with the result than with Lean’s version of ‘This Happy Breed’, thinking it too static and stagey. Watching it, you can’t help agreeing, despite the film version’s attempts to get out of the living room at every opportunity, with several scenes driving along in a car or at Madame Arcati’s house.

The general clunkiness is driven home by the film’s drastic departure from the play’s ending. The play ends with Charles swanning off abroad, leaving the women smashing up his house in frustration. The film ends with Charles merrily driving down towards the bridge where Ruth crashed, while the ghosts watch smiling, because they’ve sabotaged the car, again. The car crashes and seconds later Charles plonks down on the bridge beside his two ex-wives. In the play, man triumphs, two women left fuming. In the film, the two women win. No doubt this sounded like a funny idea in the script conferences, but the clumsy clunkiness with which it’s shot, the lack of any punchline and the film’s abrupt ending, all leave you with an impression of clumsiness.

Coward’s negative opinion was reflected in the film’s lack of box office success – but it has subsequently come to be valued for its Technicolor photography and Oscar-winning visual effects.

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by Simon on June 20, 2025  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 20, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/06/20/blithe-spirit-noel-coward/