Ironic though it may be, ‘The Vortex’ – Noël Coward’s breakthrough 1920s play about a glamorous socialite desperate to cling onto her youth – has actually aged rather well, helped by Alison Chitty’s ritzy design and the clarity of Peter Hall’s direction.
It’s a tale of narcissism and dysfunction in which Florence Lancaster (Felicity Kendal), a woman of ‘shrill vanity’, displays an appetite for extravagant living and young, virile men. When her son Nicky (Dan Stevens) returns home from Paris with a fiancée, who just so happens to be the ex-girlfriend of her current fling, the brittle veneer of their superficial conviviality is shattered. Nicky’s drug addiction is revealed, as is Florence’s promiscuity: on the gently-raked stage, the characters descend into ‘a vortex of beastliness’.
Florence would probably describe Kendal’s performance as ‘delicious’ – and one would be hard pushed to disagree. At the start, she’s as bright and bouncy as the curls on her head; by the end, both are utterly undone. Meanwhile, Stevens imparts a measured fragility into the role of Nicky.
The climactic closing scene feels more like an exchange between two bruised lovers, and indeed, the play’s oft-mentioned homosexual subtext is overpowered by the latent oedipal relationship between Nicky and Florence. But the pace never slackens in this lithe production, and while Hall’s ‘vortex’ isn’t quite as dark as it could be, it remains a persuasive study of society frivolity and what really lies beneath.
