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The Vortex: fabulous new life for Noël Coward’s scandalous drama

Sensational: Lia Williams and Sean Delaney in the Vortex - Helen Murray
Sensational: Lia Williams and Sean Delaney in the Vortex - Helen Murray

 Actorly nepotism is a subject currently under the cultural spotlight, after New York magazine dubbed last year “the year of the nepo baby” due to so many famous relations making it big in Hollywood. There is automatically something a little galling, then, when a mother and son are seen to be not only in the same industry, but are cast in the very same play.

Yet what Lia Williams and her hugely talented son Joshua James achieve together in this production of The Vortex at Chichester Festival Theatre is nothing short of sensational: an entrancing chemistry that catalyses Noël Coward’s script to capture something wonderfully profound about the co-existence of conflict and love in a dysfunctional family.

The Vortex opened to a storm of controversy in 1924, propelling Coward to fame with its tale of the drug-addicted and homosexual Nicky Lancaster returning home from Paris to find his ageing socialite mother Florence cavorting with a man the same age as himself. For its audience 99 years later, the play has aesthetics perhaps most recognisable from Downton Abbey, but instead of the ITV drama’s one-dimensional soap opera, we have a rich dramatic tapestry that veers wonderfully between camp cattiness and intense, heartfelt melodrama.

Florence has all the best Cowardian lines (“With a temperament like mine it’s impossible to be another humdrum woman”; “He’s grown old, I’ve kept young”), and they are delivered with verve by Williams. James’s Nicky is her double, equally camp and charming, but with a darkness spun into his posh affectedness that soon unravels the illusionary worlds they have both built to support their wayward sensibilities. There is something irresistible about how these true-life relatives catch eyes as this dynamic plays out, and there is a delicacy to Daniel Raggett’s direction as he subtly steers the duo through emotions ranging from empathy to violence.

Joanna Scotcher’s set is a rich blend of wood panels, leather-bound armchairs, art nouveau trinkets, and a grand piano expertly tinkered on-stage by James. A strong supporting cast of 1920s party people help complete the image, and a spinning stage dramatically enacts the titular vortex of crazed social dynamics.

Towards the end, the production can feel a little heavy-handed, with comedic moments required to balance the action instead repressed to leave us with a climax that is perhaps a touch too melodramatic. But half a century after the death of its author, this production firmly reminds us that Coward is not simply a writer of light comedy, but a masterful social observer. His comments here on ageism and familial dysfunction remain pertinent even as we reach a century since they were first written.


Until May 20; 01243 781312; cft.org.uk/events/the-vortex