Editing Blithe Spirit (play) (section)

==Synopsis==
Charles Condomine is a successful novelist. At the start of the play, while dressing for dinner, he and his second wife, Ruth, discuss his first wife, Elvira, who died young, seven years earlier. He comments, "I remember her physical attractiveness, which was tremendous, and her spiritual integrity, which was nil".<ref>Coward (1941), p. 4</ref> Among the Condomines' dinner guests is an eccentric medium, Madame Arcati, whom Charles has invited in the hope of learning about the occult for a story he is writing. He has arranged for her to conduct a séance after dinner. During the séance she plays a recording of [[Irving Berlin]]'s song "[[Always (Irving Berlin song)|Always]]" on the gramophone, inadvertently attracting the ghost of Elvira.<ref>Coward (1941), pp. 17 and 20</ref>

The medium leaves, unaware of what she has done. Only Charles can see or hear Elvira, and Ruth does not believe that Elvira exists, until a floating vase is handed to her out of thin air. The ghostly Elvira makes continued, and increasingly desperate, efforts to disrupt Charles's current marriage. Charles accuses her of being "feckless and irresponsible and morally unstable".<ref>Coward (1941), p. 69</ref> She finally sabotages his car in the hope of killing him so that he will join her in the spirit world, but it is Ruth rather than Charles who drives off and is killed.<ref>Mander and Mitchenson, pp. 368−369</ref>

Ruth's ghost immediately comes back for revenge on Elvira, and though Charles cannot at first see Ruth, he can see that Elvira is being chased and tormented, and his house is in uproar. He calls Madame Arcati back to exorcise both the spirits, but instead of banishing them she unintentionally materialises Ruth. With both his dead wives now fully visible, and neither of them in the best of tempers, Charles, together with Madame Arcati, goes through séance after séance and spell after spell to try to exorcise them. It is not until Madame Arcati works out that the housemaid, Edith, is psychic and had unwittingly been the conduit through which Elvira was summoned that she succeeds in dematerialising both ghosts.<ref>Coward (1941), p. 83</ref> Charles is left seemingly in peace, but Madame Arcati, hinting that the ghosts may still be around unseen, warns him that he should go far away as soon as possible. Coward repeats one of his signature theatrical devices at the end of the play, where the central character tiptoes out as the curtain falls – a device that he also used in ''[[Present Laughter]]'', ''[[Private Lives]] ''and ''[[Hay Fever (play)|Hay Fever]]''.<ref>Lahr, p. 71</ref> Charles bids his vanished wives farewell and leaves at once; the unseen ghosts throw things and wreck the room as soon as he has gone.<ref>Mander and Mitchenson, pp. 371−372</ref><!-- NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE END OF THE 1945 FILM IN WHICH CHARLES'S CAR CRASHES AS HE LEAVES AND HE JOINS HIS WIVES AS A GHOST-->