”The Vortex” at Chichester Festival Theatre – review

Part drawing room comedy and part – in Kenneth Tynan’s words – “jeremiad against narcotics”, it retains its power nearly a century later thanks to the intensity of its depiction of the mother and son relationship of Florence and Nicky Lancaster.

Florence desperately wants to preserve her youth, flinging herself at the world with a young lover on her arm. Nicky – the part Coward originally played – desperately wants her love and acceptance. When his engagement flounders in the course of the action, it precipitates a crisis of identity that recalls Hamlet’s troubled relationship with his own mother.

The selling point of this Chichester Festival production is that Florence and Nicky are played by real life mother and son Lia Williams and Joshua James, who approach that final confrontation with terrifying emotion. She is all flailing arms and terror, a monstrously vain figure unable to see beyond her own narcissistic need as she staves off reality, “all the time wanting life to be as it was instead of as it is.”

He is all trembling emotion, fearful of his addiction as well as his sense of a hidden life – the play clearly hints at his homosexuality, with Coward pushing the bounds of truth as far as it was possible to do at the time. It is an engrossing conclusion to the night, perhaps more Strindberg than Coward, but devastating nonetheless.

Daniel Raggett’s expressionistic production builds relentlessly to this point. By this moment, Joanna Scotcher’s elaborate set which perfectly conjures the oppressive decoration of Florence’s privileged life, has been stripped away to a circle of light where mother and son prowl like animals howling at the moon.

The problem with this approach is that Coward’s wit sometimes gets lost in the onward rush to drama. His strange and enticing blend of sophisticated humour and heartfelt emotion is somehow out of balance. Words are deliberately lost in the production’s desire to create a physical embodiment of the “vortex of beastliness” which Nicky feels trapped by.

When the words are as good as “I always knew the continent was fatal for the young”, delivered with biting precision by Richard Cant’s finely-judged Pauncefort, the loss feels very acute. The tone is too relentlessly dark.

There is nevertheless much to admire and enjoy. Priyanga Burford’s plain-talking Helen who sees Nicky’s suffering and Florence’s self-absorption so clearly is a lovely, calm presence; so is Hugh Ross as the neglected husband whose melancholy appearances are all too brief.

Above all, the revival is a reminder of just what a bold, brilliant writer Coward was, how deeply he understood the human heart in all its delusion, even as he held his characters up to the bright light of his incisive cleverness.