"I will ever be grateful for the almost psychic gift that enabled me to write Blithe Spirit in five days during one of the darkest years of the war." - Noel Coward. Written in 1941, Blithe Spirit remained the longest-running comedy in British Theatre for years. Plotted around the central role of one of Coward's best loved characters, a medium Madame Arcati (originally played by Margaret Rutherford). Coward's play is a spirited charade about a man with 2 wives, one dead and another alive.