Blithe Spirit review Angela Lansbury's happy medium

Quiz: Noël Coward or Murder, She Wrote?

She strides on in plaid tweeds, and shimmies around in a bespangled gilet. Under a sparkling hair-net, bright ginger plaits snake around her ears like headphones, a hair arrangement modelled on the woman who looked after the actress as a child. Burbling necromantic nonsense, she judders across the stage in an Egyptian sand dance, swoons into trance and gushes over ghosts that she can't see. Yet she also has hearty, bullying-off moments and flashes of beady-eyed shrewdness. She is part Brown Owl, part Barn Owl.

It is above all Angela Lansbury that people have come to see in Blithe Spirit. The 88-year-old actor, who has played mother to Elvis Presley, Laurence Harvey and Hamlet, who has starred in Gypsy and Sweeney Todd and been svelte and crisp as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, now takes on one of the stage's lovable gargoyles. Madame Arcati, the preposterous medium who claims to have had her first ectoplasmic manifestation when she was five and a half, is not actually the largest part in Noël Coward's 1941 comedy. Yet she – inhabited with benign splendour by Margaret Rutherford on screen – is the character everyone remembers. Lansbury gets a Broadway burst of applause whenever she arrives on the stage. She earns it. Not only for her rococo adornments but for something more central. Her Madame Arcati is not merely a dotty fraud but someone who believes in her own mystic powers. This is essential. For the grip of Michael Blakemore's remarkable production – one that grows in the course of the evening – is in showing how disturbing this glacial comedy can be.

Coward wrote Blithe Spirit in five days during the second world war. At the premiere the audience walked on planks over rubble caused by an air-raid to watch a play that seemed to giggle at death. The plot is like a parody of a folk tale in which a witchdoctor wreaks havoc among superstitious villagers. A man whose first wife died of a heart attack while listening to a comedy show on the BBC Light Programme (does the audience's pleasure at this show scepticism or belief?) takes part, with Wife Two, at a seance. The ghost of Wife One turns up, unseen by all but her former hubbie, and causes mayhem. Wife Two gets done in by Wife One and herself comes back for a double haunting. Yet the dialogue is pure Coward, acidic and nonchalant. "Anything interesting in the Times?" "Don't be silly, Charles."

It is not altogether surprising that Graham Greene considered this "a weary exhibition of bad taste" or that others recoiled. Yet the play was an enormous popular success: its record number (for a non-musical) of 1,997 performances in the West End was to be broken only by The Mousetrap. The war years spawned a number of plays featuring time travel and marvellous returns, JB Priestley's among them. Still, you could hardly say that this tale of a trio at war among themselves offers much solace. The ghosts are furious. The ending is not happy. Coward said: "If there was a heart, it would be a sad story.'

What it does have is technical daring and theatrical brio. A versatile misogyny, in which one vamp, one crank, and one nag circle around a charming male wastrel, allows ample opportunity for sharp-edged performances.

Many people still find it easier to laugh at a batty woman than a witty one. So Lansbury gets more comic approval than Janie Dee as Wife Two, who is not yet at her most goldenly relaxed best (and shoe-horned into a hideous purple dress with cut-out shoulders). Charles Edwards as the suave but set-upon Charles, the part that Coward played on tour, is effortlessly accomplished: urbane rather than arch, suggesting a lifetime at ease with his own good opinion of himself. Patsy Ferran makes a scene-stealing debut as the alarming maid who gallops everywhere. She adds something singularly disconcerting. With her head on one side, and a swivelling eye, she sticks her face too close to everyone for comfort. As if she were hoovering up ectoplasm.

It is hard to imagine Coward's plaited dialogue better projected in the scene in which Charles talks both to his living wife and to his ghostly first, whom only he can see. New playwrights should study it, as they should the spectacular moments of spectral action in which childish magic and adult chilliness meet. With the arrival of ghosts, doors need to be opened and shut by an invisible hand. A gramophone must begin playing Always without assistance. No massive machinery is employed here. There is no recourse to cinematic special effects. This is theatrical sleight-of-hand taking place in front of the audience's eyes.

One of the most beguiling asides in Blakemore's memoir Stage Blood, which has just won this year's Sheridan Morley prize for theatre biography, comes when the great theatrical veteran describes a technical difficulty in The Front Page. He explains that he solved it by using a device that "I remembered from my time as a child conjuror". Those days have stood him in good stead.

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