Noel Coward’s The Vortex - Chichester

Is The Vortex really a comedy? Yes there is humour in the dialogue, but the actual story is very dark. I remember seeing Rupert Everett and Maria Aitken do it years ago and there weren't a lot of laughs.

I don't know whether we dodged a bullet with this one but my car broke down on the way to Chichester to see this last night, so our evening's entertainment involved a lot of people watching from the edge of the A27 while waiting for the AA.

Were you stuck in a motorway vortex?

Saw this this afternoon and liked it very much.

I share the view that this isn't a comedy, but rather a melodramatic moral critique of bright young (and not so young) things, and while there are flashes of brilliance in it, I don't think it's a very good play. That said, I thought this was an absolutely terrific production of it, a 5 star production of a 3 star play.

It was especially great to see Lia Williams on top flighty (and dramatic form), apparently and hopefully recovered from her recent physical injuries, and playing together opposite an equally terrific performance by her son.

Some spoilers follow. . .

Most of the Coward plays I've seen are obviously for laughs, usually about flighty eccentric people getting one over on middle class society by gleefully breaching all their boring stifling rules, with everything else being subtext and frills.

But this play was his first hit, when I imagine that he didn't yet dare to fully embrace his own frivolous and "scandalous" instincts. Here, he tries to have his cake (ie scandalous behaviour, darling) while refusing to eat it (isn't it all so dreadful). By the time the very serious matter of WW2 kicked in, he would return to this approach of pronouncing po-faced judgement on scandalous behaviour, but with more finesse and experience, with "Brief Encounter," so all the fun plays are in between.

Anyway, the scandalous behaviour here involves adultery and cocaine use amid a background milieu of all-fun-all-the-time. And Terrence Rattigan's "After the Dance" feels like a thoroughly superior reworking of this play, with the doom-laden atmosphere suiting Rattigan's poetic doomy persona a lot better than Coward's, who basically resorts to OTT melodrama 101 when it comes to critiquing the scandalous behaviour he loves to write about.

I feel that Daniel Raggett does a phenomenal job of poetically Rattiganising this production, creating a circular (occasionally spinning) vortex of a stage that contains lots and lots of bright young thing pleasures, all of which he shows to be ephemeral: copious cigarette smoke wisps into nothingness; a singer sings and vanishes; splendid fashionable outfits are worn and discarded; Joshua James's Nicky plays the piano, and the piano disappears along with the melodies; characters dance merrily only to be sidelined by business and vanish. I felt thoroughly seduced by the milieu while constantly feeling it's loss, which loss I felt was wonderfully realised.

The casting is exquisite across the board: Richard Cant does young Bohemian Michael York better than Michael York did (lol); Sean Delaney does "I'm young, dangerous, bored easily and disdain "effeminate" men" so perfectly that we're minutes away from the Daily Mail offering odds on him being the next James Bond; David Lancaster is so composed, forlorn, mannered and old as Lia Williams's Florence's sad cuckold of a husband that he exposes the phoniness of the world around him; Jessica Allade's singer swans in and out singing beautifully; and the central duo are pitch perfect, with Lia Williams, looking more like her real son's sister than his mother, flapping and floating about being charming, before slowly but surely revealing a soul part empty, part lost, and Joshua James combining his expertise at lightness (eg "No Quarter") and dramatic weight (eg "Fathers and Sons") to create a character who has his mother's lightness but has the poetic gravitas to challenge it.

Ultimately, it is Coward's OTT melodramatic speeches, especially towards the end, that detract from the incredible work of the directors and players. At times, this is as good as "After the Dance," but at others, it is so melodramatic that nothing can save it. A terrific production nonetheless.

3 and a half stars from me.

This is worth seeing if you want to see a production of The Vortex, hard to believe there will be a better one in the next 15 years.

Ditto, and a first akaik for the Minerva to have a 5 pm performance which, provided it dovetails with the matinee in the main house - which apparently it does, though that info wasn't available at the time of booking so I had to chance it - is, or should be, so much easier for travelling home. Of course, the threat of train strikes and overtime bans has now returned and apparently there will be a "reduced service" that day, so waiting to see what that means, but both performances, ie this one and in the Minerva, are straight-through, no interval, so perhaps a bit gruelling but with the bonus of an earlier finish.

Slightly off-topic (apologies) but related: as there seem to be so many of us, even here, never mind amongst the wider CFT audience, who travel some distance to visit and might like to see 2 productions in one day if transport allowed, I do hope CFT will add more early evening performances. Of course, theatres generally don't offer these both as the historical model assumes people will attend after work on a weekdy (though many of the CFT regulars are clearly beyond standard working age) and some venues have restaurants, or more than one, and want people to dine there first. Wish however that they would do a poll as I could never afford to have a meal as well as paying for the ticket and train fare and besides, with the constant concern about trains and being able to get home after the performance, my priority is to ensure a prompt getaway, not to prolong the evening.

I'm going to see 4000 miles on 27 May, the reviews don't sound great but the train is very cheap at least...

Hmmm saw this tonight and unsure. Up until the final 15 minutes or so I was enjoying it enough, it wasn’t the best or funniest play but I was not hating it. The final scene between Lia Williams and Joshua James was just to shouty and incoherent to the rest of the play and I really disengaged at this moment. There were some decisions I liked and others that didn’t work well but on the whole was a middling night out.