← All events
theatre · Friday 7 August 2026 · 7:00pm 
Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit
At Edmondstown House · Edmondstown, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon F45 NX04
At Edmondstown House · Edmondstown, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon F45 NX04
Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit gets a three-night run at Edmondstown House from Friday 7 to Sunday 9 August 2026, as part of the Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival programme. Coward’s comedy follows novelist Charles Condomine, who invites a fake medium to his home for research purposes and ends up haunted by the ghost of his first wife, to the increasing distress of his second. It is one of the best-known English-language comedies of the twentieth century, and staging it inside a nineteenth-century house rather than a conventional theatre gives the production an unusually apt setting.
The play runs on wit rather than spectacle: a small cast, a single drawing-room setting, and dialogue that carries most of the comedy, built around the awkward triangle between Charles, his very alive second wife Ruth, and the ghost of his first wife Elvira, summoned back by the medium Madame Arcati’s séance. Coward wrote it in five days in 1941, reportedly to distract himself during the London Blitz, and its combination of dark subject matter and light farce has kept it in regular production ever since. Edmondstown House was built in 1864 as the Bishop of Achonry’s residence, known locally as the Bishop’s Palace, and its period rooms give a play about a haunted Victorian-adjacent household a setting that does some of the work for the production before a word is spoken. The show runs three consecutive nights at 7pm, giving festival-goers more than one chance to catch it around the rest of the programme.
Edmondstown House is about 4km outside Ballaghaderreen town. The venue is roughly 20 minutes from Ireland West Airport Knock and reachable by car from Roscommon town via the N60 and local roads.
Blithe Spirit runs during the wider Ballaghaderreen Arts Festival, so a visit can easily take in other exhibitions and events in the town on the same trip. There is more to see in Ballaghaderreen and across Co. Roscommon.
Heading to Edmondstown House in Ballaghaderreen? Roscommon has plenty more to see. Read the Ballaghaderreen area guide, find what else is on, and explore the towns and villages nearby.