Peter Viney's Blog

by Noël Coward

Directed by Daniel Raggett
Set Design by Joanna Scotcher
Costume by Evie Gurney
Lighting design by Zoe Spurr
Music and Sound Giles Thomas

Chichester Festival Theatre

Thursday 11th May 2023 14.30

CAST

Joshua James – Nicky Lancaster
Lia Williams – Florence Lancaster
David Ross- Hugh Lancaster
Esme Scarborough – Preston
Jessica Alade- Clara Hibbert
Priyanga Burford – Helen Saville
Richard Cant- Pauncefort Quentin
Sean Delaney– Tom Veryan
Isabella Laughland – Bunty Mainwaring
Evan Milton – Bruce Fairlight

It starts in the lobby. Chichester have done this before, memorably with the Norman Conquests. The lobby is a Noël Coward exhibition with original memorabilia, photos, letters, costumes from previous Chichester productions of Coward plays. Few if any theatres have the lobby size for it … even the National is scuppered by the multiple levels of lobby. We had a quick coffee when we parked before eleven and perused it thoroughly. This is just one section:

It’s the play that made Noël Coward famous (and notorious) in 1924. John Gielgud was Coward’s understudy. It caused ructions at the time with its mention of drugs, explicit adultery and coded references to homosexuality, some of which were eradicated by the Lord Chamberlain. It couldn’t get a West End run initially, opening in Hampstead.

We’ve seen it before I started this reviews blog. The last time was the 2002 Michael Grandage production at the Donmar Warehouse with Francesca Annis and Chiwetel Ejiofor.

That production omitted some of the suggestions that Nicky was gay, and Chiwetel Ejiofor focussed on the addicted jazz pianist aspect. As we see in the recent film, Babylon, Hollywood was awash with both cocaine and opiates in the 1920s. It’s near impossible to compare memories of productions twenty years apart, but I believe that this 2023 was definitely the superior one. Daniel Raggett has issued a “new edited version” of the play text, and he says he went back to Noël Coward’s longhand notes and re-inserted the bits the censors took out in 1924. I’ll be pedantic Mr Raggett, they were almost certainly not “longhand in A4 notebooks” as the A4 format in the UK arrived rather later than elsewhere, in 1971. They were likely to have been quarto or foolscap. Coward gave ludicrously detailed set directions in the French’s Acting editions (we have others but not The Vortex), placing every ashtray exactly. They’ve all gone. I assume some of the stage directions surviving in the new edition must be Coward’s:

Florence is beautifully dressed and very gay.

Tom is athletic and good-looking. One feels he is good at Games and bad at everything else.

Bunty comes in, very self-assured and well-dressed. She is more attractive than pretty, in a boyish sort of way.

Some, as ever is too explicit:

(Nicky) is tall and pale, with thin nervous hands.

Does that mean you can’t cast an actor with ordinary suntanned hands?

The plot

It is a striking start to the 2023 Festival Theatre Season and bodes well.

We start by meeting the cast of jazz age socialites, bickering away, waiting for the arrival of Florence.

This is a mother and son production. Lia Williams is Joshua James’ mother in real life and in the play. The play centres around socialite Florence Lancaster (Lia Williams, and her son Nicky(Joshua James) Florence has a toy boy, the rugged guardsman Tom (Sean Delaney). She flaunts him to her friends and in front of her much older husband, David.

Nicky, her son, arrives back from a year in Paris. He’s a pianist. Embarrassingly he’s 24, the same age as Tom. He’s arrived back a day early.

Nicky announces his engagement to Bunty Mainwairing (Isabella Laughland), and she is to be a house guest. She arrives, and we discover that Tom and Bunty have previous. They are also similar hearty, down to earth types.

Florence’s best friend, Helen (Priyanga Burford), realizes that Nicky is addicted to cocaine. The last act is the long showdown between Nicky and Florence.

The cocaine addiction (well, the text says ‘drugs’ so it could be morphine, which is more physically addictive) is taken as a coded reference to Nicky’s homosexuality. Tom thinks him ‘effeminate’. Nicky hasn’t noticed, he says, whether Bunty is good-looking, and in this production strongly avoids her getting too intimate with him. Note that she’s ‘attractive in a boyish sort of way‘ which may be why she appeals to Nicky. The text intro says one line from Coward’s draft was Nicky’s ‘It’s strange. I don’t want to go byes (beddy-byes) with her at all.’ That is reinstated.

The production

It’s played without an interval, at a brisk 1 hour 35 minutes. As with the lobby display, we get more before the play starts. When we go in, Helen is already sitting on the set. Gradually the other ‘hangers-on’ drift onto the set and take seats.

I always thought Coward’s The Vortex to be two acts of comic persiflage followed by a re-run of the closet scene from Hamlet.

Michael Billington, The Guardian 11 December 2002, reviewing the Donmar production

That’s the classic issue. The play is not typical Coward. It begins with typical banter and humour, but moves into something far darker. BUT here, the set design by Joanna Scotcher is crucial, such a major element in the play, and interestingly, it makes total sense of the sharply shifting mood in a way previous productions haven’t. First the semi-circular stage has a black swirling vortex surrounding the green carpeted main area.

At the beginning, it is a fully-stuffed set. Act one in Florence’s apartment has art deco furniture and is incredibly detailed. Many pictures mounted on the panelled wall, lamps everywhere. Footstools, a pair of chairs I’d love to have. A minor negative is that it’s three-dimensional, which means in Row A & B you have some obstruction from chairs and tables on the outer edge of the thrust stage. We were in Row A, facing a lamp and a spindly chair, but to our left there were more substantial chairs at the front edge. It was only a small irritation.

Then it moves to the country house. The back wall goes, grey side panels appear, and half the furniture goes.

Coward wrote: This scene will probably be exceedingly difficult to produce, but is absolutely indispensable.

At this point the revolving stage is used better than I’ve seen before with the dance scene and then couples speaking as their part of the revolve gets to front centre. As with so many current TV series, they use anachronistic modern music. Clara, the singer (Jessica Alade) sings David Bowie’s Oh, You Pretty Things as they dance and whirl and revolve. She does it to a jazzier 20s setting, which made me realize that Bowie was always partly channelling that era in the music. It’s a perfect choice.

So, the set is now much sparser than before. Gradually as we move through Act 2 into Act 3, other furniture is removed – Joshua James has to push the baby grand piano off himself – we used to have a baby grand piano in shows, and it’s not easy. Finally, the last item to go is Florence’s mirror in her bedroom, leaving Florence and Nicky on a bare stage.

A vortex turns and sucks everything into the centre, leaving emptiness.

Whatever sets we see this year, I can’t think we’ll see the set and the set changes actually direct the motion of the drama like this.

Lia Williams is outstanding. She arrives with Tom, both dressed in aviator costumes. She’s slim with an attractive boyish hair cut. She is full on extrovert, with her acolytes drawn like moths to a flame. She is expending tremendous energy to look young. Then in Act 3, she has to go into shouted passionate dialogue. We saw the matinee, and thought ‘How is she going to put so much in twice in a day?’

Joshua James has to go from effete to dark eyed worryingly snappy and irritable to also full on passionate rage in the final scene. This was Noël Coward’s 1924 role. His clothes are silkier, his hair floppier. It’s a ‘I can’t imagine anyone else in this role’ performance.

The play is about ageing, and Florence’s refusal to accept it. I have no idea of how she manages to look like a bright, happy late-30 something in Act One, and suddenly appear to age 20 years in Act 3. One line appealed to the matinee audience at Chichester, which is largely elderly.

All the support is great. Richard Cant’s character, Pauncie, is flamboyantly gay and bitchy. He’s very funny, and the lines help. Helen (Priyanga Burford ) is the one who works it all out. She is the lone sensible one. Hugh Ross is the exhausted husband of Florence, David.

Nicky (to Bunty): There’s no harm in her anywhere – she’s just young inside. Can you imagine the utter foulness of growing old?

A quiet chuckle rippled right round the Festival Theatre.

The play is peppered with arch and catty theatrical allusions. I’d have assumed Florence was an actress, as are her friends. This is just a stage direction:

Bruce Fairlight, an earnest dramatist, the squalor of whose plays is much appreciated by those who live in comparative luxury.

Phew! And Coward wrote that thirty years before the arrival of kitchen-sink drama too.

The warning signs say ‘herbal tobacco’ is used, and you cannot do Coward without smoking – it’s in the text. A few years back, herbal cigarettes filled theatres with that fruity bonfire smell. We were at the front and they seemed odourless, but they did look like cigarettes, not the vapour mist fakes other theatres use. Another point for the designer … Helen took her cigarettes from a vintage Craven A packet. They should have found a Passing Clouds pack for Nicky. They were oval, in a pink packet and extremely effete.

We both agreed that it was the template for a 5 star rating. we’ve had a run of five stars this month (following a run of 2 stars earlier in the year). Are we getting extreme reactions? I’m surprised this didn’t get any 5’s from the national press. Shocked at the 2s and 3s. While the play made Coward’s name and fortune, it is a less-produced one because it does not meet the preconceptions of a Coward play. This is just a year from its centenary.

FIVE STARS *****

NEGATIVES

The photo used for publicity has the wrong hairstyles, wrong hair colour and wrong costumes. They were done months ago. It’s not unusual.They look nothing remotely like this.

A major one for me. Ninety five minutes. Oh, You Pretty Things must take up two to three of those ninety-five minutes. I cannot find any reference to David Bowie in the programme but he is about three per cent of the text and the best piece of music. Then Nicky plays a rough Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue. In the programme, they credit the milliner, the rehearsal room and the piano tuner. Giles Thomas is credited with ‘Music and Sound.’ The reasoning will be that they want the anachronism of a 1972 song to be a surprise. I get that, and I might put it a couple of pages back, but the Watermill always uses anachronistic popular music for Shakespeare with similar impact (cooing Roy Orbison’s ‘In Dreams’ to a sleeping Duncan as Macbeth creeps in with a dagger is unforgettable). The Watermill devotes a page every time and lists and credits the songs properly.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

4 star
Emma John, The Guardian ****
Nick Ferris, The Telegraph ****
Libby Purves, British Theatre ****

3 star
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ***
Dominic Maxwell, The Times ***

2 star
Ismene Brown, The Arts Desk **

LINKS ON THIS BLOG

NOËL COWARD

• Blithe Spirit by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2010 (Alison Steadman)
• Blithe Spirit, by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2019 (Jennifer Saunders)
• Blithe Spirit FILM 2021 (Judi Dench)
• Fallen Angels, by Noël Coward, Salisbury Playhouse
• Hay Fever by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• Relative Values by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• This Happy Breed by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal
• Present Laughter, by  Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal, 2003 Rik Mayall (retrospective)
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Bath Theatre Royal 2106, Samuel West
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Chichester 2018, Rufus Hound
• Present Laughter by Noël Coward, Old Vic 2019, Andrew Scott
• Private Lives by Noël Coward, Nigel Havers Theatre Company, 2021, Chichester
• Private Lives, by Noël Coward, Donmar Warehouse, London 2023
• Noël Coward’s Brief Encounter, by Emma Rice, Salisbury Playhouse, 2023
• The Vortex, by Noël Coward, Chichester Festival Theatre 2023

JOSHUA JAMES
Lady Windermere’s Fan, Classic Spring, 2018
King Lear, Globe 2017 (Edgar)
Life of Galileo, Young Vic, 2017  (Ludovico + various)
The Seagull, Chichester 2015 (Konstantin)
Platonov, Chichester 2015 (Dr Triletsky)

LIA WILLIAMS
Doubt, Chichester 2022 (DIRECTOR)
John Gabriel Borkman, Bridge Theatre, 2022

RICHARD CANT
Henry VI- Wars of The Roses, RSC 2022
Henry VI- Rebellion, RSC 2022
Edward II, by Marlowe, Wanamaker Playhouse 2018
My Night With Reg by Kevin Elyot, Donmar & West End, 2015

PRIYANGA BURFORD
Eyam, by Matt Hartley, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2018
The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2018