‘Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!’ (Pawnie is camp)

‘It’s never too early for a cocktail.’ (Florence is sophisticated)

‘We’re all so hectic and nervy.’ (Nicky is neurotic)

‘Mother’s impossible.’ (the crux of the play)

Executive summary

A self-centred mother and her spoilt unstable son are both jilted – she by their toyboy lover and he by  his unsuitable fiancée – and, in a blistering final act, spend twenty minutes blaming each other for their failures and neuroses, amid tears and breakdowns.

Noel Coward

Obviously I’ve known the name Noel Coward for decades and seen a couple of his films, but never actually read any of his plays. So I was astonished, on reading this his breakthrough play, to discover the limits of its wit, that most of it is not funny at all, and that all attempts at comedy are swept away by the tsunami of overwrought melodrama in the third and final act.

Even in the earlier, lighter scenes, instead of wit it has posh upper-class attitude – ‘Oh darling, it was simply too super for words!’ This attitude is exaggerated for comic effect, exaggerated to make the characters seem absurd, exaggeration which passes for wit but isn’t actually witty.

To this end the dialogue is packed with too’s and perfectly’s and divine’s, and stuffed with exclamation marks! which largely only make sense when read on the page. How should an actor speak an exclamation mark, especially when the next sentence ends in an exclamation mark, and the one after that, and after that?

Too’s:

• It’s too marvelous for words.
• She’s too divine to be in any marked category.
• She ought to have been a flaunting, intriguing King’s mistress, with black page boys and jade baths and things too divine—
• Isn’t it too awful for him?
• Oh, you’re really too tiresome for words!
• she’s too, too marvelous.
• Isn’t it too divine?
• How too divine!
• It’s too wonderful.
• How too intriguing.

Perfectly’s:

• How perfectly marvelous!
• How perfectly sweet of you!
• How perfectly fiendish!
• Take off that perfectly divine cloak and have a cigarette.
• How perfectly heavenly!
• I adore her—she’s a perfect angel.

Divine’s:

• He’s divinely selfish; all amusing people are.
• You’re smelling divinely, Florence. What is it?
• Isn’t it too divine?
• Good-bye, Helen. It’s been divine—
• You’re a divine creature, Florence.
• Oh, is she coming down to the house? Divine!
• What a divine thing to say!
• She does say divine things—she’s supremely intelligent.
• How too divine!

Somewhere regarding Coward I read the word ‘flippant’ and yes, that’s the word: ‘The Vortex’ betrays an attitude of sustained flippancy to everything. There are some lines which distantly echo Oscar Wilde but without the bite of his astonishing paradoxes. Instead all the supposed jokes build up, not to a punchline, but to the revelation of the same flippantly superior attitude.

PAWNIE: Oh, my God, look at that lampshade!
HELEN: I gave it to her last Christmas.
PAWNIE: Wasn’t that a little naughty of you?
HELEN: I don’t see why; it’s extremely pretty.
PAWNIE: Too unrestrained. Such a bad example for the servants.

Six lines to deliver what? A titter. Almost any modern sitcom you can possibly think of is better written.

Comedy is often triggered by unexpected reversals (such as Wilde’s paradoxes). In the discourse of this play this tone, this superior flippant attitude, is what you very quickly come to expect from the characters and so it comes as no surprise – there are no surprises – all the characters radiate the same smart-alec flippant attitude, with the result that it is all sort-of amusing without ever becoming actually funny.

Coward titled one of his later plays ‘A Talent To Amuse’ which Sheridan Morley then picked up as the title for his biography of Coward, and the phrase perfectly captures the way Coward was consistently amusing but gave few if any belly laughs, the kind of laugh when you are suddenly tricked into delighted hilarity and explode with laughter.

‘The Vortex’ contains a few sort-of bon mots or up-to-a-point words of wisdom – but no really shrewd insights, no real zingers, and so nothing very memorable. This is one of the most quoted insights from the play.

‘The great thing in this world is not to be obvious, Nicky—over anything!’ (Helen to Nicky)

I’m remembering now that maybe I did read some Coward when I was at school and just found him to be a cut-price Wilde, a supermarket Oscar.

(In Philip Hoare’s excellent 1995 biography of Coward I was amused to find that the office of the Censor, the Lord Chamberlain, agreed with me. Its reader, George Street, commented: ‘The theme of this play is grimly serious and painful in an extreme degree. Until the end, however, the atmosphere is that of frivolous people who speak in a tiresome jargon – everything is “too divine” etc – and attempt wit with rather poor results.’ Exactly. (Hoare, p.133) And so did Cecil Beaton. He saw the play on New Year’s Eve 1924 and wrote in his diary: ‘I thought the first act was amusing but very ordinary – it’s so easy to write those flashy remarks that are not absolutely brilliant’: (Hoare, p.137))

Cast

Preston – Florence Lancaster’s female servant

Florence Lancaster – mother to Nicky, about 40: ‘David’s always loved me and never understood me—you see, I’m such an extraordinary mixture. I have so many sides to my character’ — took me a while to realise that she is the ‘vortex’ of the title, everything caught up in her stormy narcissism, :

‘I can’t help having a temperament, can I?’

‘Thank God I’ve got instincts about people.’

David Lancaster – Florence’s husband, Nicky’s father – ‘an elderly gray-haired pleasant man’, manages a farm in the country (actual manager is a man named Peterson); doesn’t like dancing to beastly modern music.

Nicky Lancaster – their son, 24, classical musician, just back from Paris – ‘extremely well-dressed in traveling clothes. He is tall and pale, with thin, nervous hands’ – according to Tom, ‘up in the air—effeminate.’

Helen Saville – friend of Florence, bit critical. At first you think she’s needlessly critical but come to realise she’s a voice of common sense, for both Florence and Nicky. The understander. As she tells Nicky:

‘I’m one of the few people who know what you’re really like, and you won’t give me the credit for it.’

Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin – friend of Florence, older and effeminate, camp, bitchy.

Clara Hibbert – friend, soprano i.e singer.

Tom Veryan – Florence’s boyfriend, ‘the very nicest type of Englishman’, in ‘the Brigade’.

Bunty Mainwaring – Nicky’s fiancée – ‘very self-assured and well-dressed. She is more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way’.

Bruce Fairlight – dramatist we meet in the second act.

Act 1

The scene is the drawing-room of Mrs Florence Lancaster’s flat in London.

Mrs Lancaster is an upper class lady who has tried her best to remain young at heart while her devoted husband, David, has let himself age.

‘I’m devoted to David—I’d do anything for him, anything in the world—but he’s grown old and I’ve kept young.’

David devotes a lot of energy to running their place in the country and its farm. Florence goes there for the spring and summer, enjoying the tennis parties, local cricket week etc.

Florence still loves London, with its high society parties and first nights at the theatre. And she has taken a young lover, Tom Veryan who is pretty much the same age as David and Florence’s son, Nicky.

The play opens with Florence at home to a rather effeminate male friend her own age, Pauncefort ‘Pauncie’ Quentin, and a woman friend, Helen Saville, ‘a smartly dressed woman of about thirty’.

Pleasant conversation turns a bit nasty when Helen is cynical about the lover, Tom, saying Florence loves him more than he loves Florence. Whereas Florence thinks that she has ‘awakened’ Tom and, as a result, he is devoted to her. Helen thinks he was infatuated but it’s starting to wear off. Florence says Helen is unsympathetic, in fact wonders whether they’re friends at all.

Enter Nicky, Florence and David’s son, a musician, who has been away in Paris. He’s surprising her by arriving a day earlier than he’d said. They chat, Florence shows him the latest photos she’s had done of herself. Narcissism.

They talk about friends then Florence tells Nicky about Tom; explains she and Tom are going out tonight, for dinner and then to see this new play, ‘The New Elaine’, then onto the Embassy (nightclub?). They slightly bicker about the actors in this play, more tiny examples of how Florence hates being contradicted.

Florence puts a record on the gramophone and invites Nicky to dance with her which is, maybe, the first sign of their unorthodox relationship.

Enter David who, seeing Nicky, gives him a hug and a kiss and invites him to his room for a chat (because he can’t stand the gramophone), goes out.

Nicky surprises his mother by announcing that he’s engaged to be married, to a lovely gel named Bunty Mainwaring. She’s come over from Paris with him, staying at her mother’s place round the corner, is going to call by any minute because Nicky wants to introduce them.

It becomes clear that Florence’s main reaction to the news is not that of a detached, objective parent, but of a middle-aged woman trying to hang onto her youth and disconcerted; her son’s engagement with marriage behind, makes her realise she is no longer young.

When Florence says she has to go and dress because Tom is picking her up at 7.30 Nicky replies ‘Damn Tom.’ He is nettled, jealous?

The doorbell rings and Preston the butler shows in Bunty. She is ‘very self-assured and well-dressed’ and ‘more attractive than pretty in a boyish sort of way.’ This boyishness, is it a reference to the play’s gender fluidity or simply reflecting the style of the 1920s was for slender boyish women?

Florence and Bunty shake hands and kiss and gush etc until Florence mentions that she’s going out tonight with Tom Veryan, which makes Bunty start a little. She knows him. Florence shows her a photo on the piano, which confirms it’s the same man. Aha. Do they have a history?

A friend phones for Florence, an Elsa who tells her she’s having a party, and Florence asks if it will be OK to bring Nicky and Bunty. She hands the phone to Nicky and exits to get dressed.

Only in the staged production do you realise how the several phone calls – five in all – add to all the banter in the first act designed to bring out how Florence keeps herself at the centre of her hurricane of activity and socialising.

After a bit of chat with Elsa Nicky ends the call and he and Bunty chat, reminiscing about how they first met. Nicky wishes they could do something romantic like elope. Bunty tells him he has so much temperament, and ‘so much hysteria’, and he agrees that ‘We’re all so hectic and nervy…’

They’re almost arguing when Preston announces Tom Veryan who has arrived to collect Florence. It immediately becomes clear that Tom and Bunty knew each other, at Sandhurst, during the war. Nicky is nettled and Bunty tells him to calm down and has to explain away his ‘nerves’ to Tom. Nonetheless, he announces he’s going to take up his father’s offer of going to his room to chat and so exits.

This leaves Bunty and Tom alone together. He is astonished when Bunty tells him she and Nicky are engaged. Tom doesn’t think Nicky is her sort at all, far too ‘effeminate’.

The butler brings cocktails and Bunty meaningfully says she’s just realised that they’ll both be going down to the Lancaster place in the country for the weekend. And with that, end of Act 1.

Act 2

The scene is the hall of Mrs Lancaster’s country house, about forty miles from London.

The Sunday of the weekend party, after dinner, the gramophone playing and a bunch of house guests. Florence, Helen, Pawnie, Nicky, Tom and Bunty and two new characters: Clara Hibbert, ‘an emaciated soprano’ and ‘Bruce Fairlight, an earnest dramatist, the squalor of whose plays is much appreciated by those who live in comparative luxury.’

Everyone is dancing and talking at once, though we only hear what they’re saying as they dance to the front of the stage. So the effect is a very modernist one of lots of fragments of speech.

We overhear Pawnie and Helen. Helen laments that Florence is so sharp about her husband in front of everyone at dinner. Pawnie calls Bunty ‘at stupid little fool.’

Nicky plays the piano to give the gramophone a break. Helen sits next to him on the stool and reaches into his pocket to find cigarettes. When she draws out a little box he leaps up and over-reacts, shouting, making everyone momentarily stop.

Moments later Florence is telling Tom off for dancing so badly, he tells her not to nag and she stops at once: ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’

Old Pawnie tries to break the tension by suggesting they play a game and after some debate they settle on Mah Jong and Clara, Bruce and Pawnie exit. But others are still bickering. Florence accuses Tom of being ‘exceedingly rude’ to her at dinner, which is revealed to be jealousy of when he talks to other women, and paranoiacally claiming that ‘everyone’ is setting him against her.

They manage to recover, he tells her her dress suits her, she forgives him, they remember first meeting at Oxford. But when she invites him to another theatre first night he says he can’t come, and hesitatingly says he’s promised to dine with his mother.

David enters and Tom makes the excuse of wanting to see how the others are getting on, to exit. Uneasy conversation with David then he exits and Nicky comes in to find his mother with her head in her hands.

Florence is temperamental, changeable, paranoid, unhappy. She tells Nicky to tell Bunty to stop contradicting her. He finds her unbearable, they argue, she storms off.

Enter Helen, the voice of reason. Slow beginning builds to her saying she realises that he takes drugs. He furiously denies it, she tells him to give it up, he says he only takes it once in a blue moon, but they’re interrupted by Nicky’s harmless old dad entering. When he asks why their voices were raised, Nicky says:

‘Helen and I have just had a grand heart-to-heart talk; we’ve undone our back hair, loosened our stays and wallowed in it.’

This is a good example of what I mean about the thinness of the play’s comedy. It’s not a joke, it’s not very funny. What it is capturing the exaggerated, mock heroic, over-dramatic pose of all the characters and by extension, of this class.

His Dad kindly asks after his health, says he looks worried, invites him to come down and stay quietly in the country and Nicky takes him up on it. David goes to bed and Nicky sits tinkling at the piano (remember all the other characters are in the other room playing games).

Bunty emerges and tells him she thinks the engagement should be broken off. She thinks it’s silly. She thinks he doesn’t love her. They argue about Florence who Bunty says hates her but Nicky insists that deep down she’s marvellous ‘in spite of everything’. He gives the longest speech in the play so far about how ghastly it must be to grow old, but Bunty thinks he’s being sentimental, maybe also unnerved by the depth of worship of his mother he reveals.

At this point their argument is broken up by Clara and Bruce entering from the back room where they’ve been playing Mah-jong, and then all the others including Florence who appears drunk. Nicky, mortally upset, listens to all their stupid banter until someone asks him to make the gramophone slower and he turns it down to crawling pace, makes some bitter remarks and storms out.

The others are all commenting on this when Bunty steps forward to explain that she’s broken off the engagement. That puts the dampeners on everything and the others all declare themselves tired and head off for bed, leaving just Tom and Bunty. Aha.

They clearly have some understanding. Tom knew she was going to break it off. They both agree they hate the atmosphere in the house and can’t wait to get away. He didn’t realise how much he hated it till she arrived, and she didn’t realise she didn’t really like Nicky till Tom arrived. They have triggered each other.

But he is ahead of her in his dislike of the Lancasters. Also he’s a dim soldier. He says Bunty is worth ten Nickys, how he’s useless, can’t play games, can’t be funny. Bunty tells him to stop then bursts into tears. He holds her then passionately kisses her.

It is, of course, at this moment that Florence has appeared on the gallery above leading to the stairs down to the lounge. She calls Tom’s name and demands to know what this means. Tom apologises but says he loves Bunty. Florence is outraged, tells Bunty to leave her house immediately – she says it’s too late and goes upstairs to bed.

At this point Nicky bursts in wondering what all the shouting is about and concerned that someone is hurt. He doesn’t understand why his mother is so furious but as the arguing continues sits at his safe space, the piano, and plays classical music while Florence has a massive showdown with Tom, you don’t know what love is, you lied to me all these months, get out of my sight etc while Nicky plays, rather madly, through it all.

Act 3

The scene is Florence’s bedroom 2 hours later the same night.

Florence is lying on her bed crying her eyes out, ‘I wish I were dead’ etc. Helen, the voice of reason, is with her, trying to comfort her. This goes on for some time, as Florence finally gets up, goes to her dressing table, sprays on some perfume. When Helen goes to the window she joins her and they admire the view.

Helen shrewdly points out that Florence is draping her feelings in her usual ‘worthless attitude of mind’. Nicky knocks and enters and Helen is relieved to get away.

There follows Florence and Nicky’s big scene. Nicky wants to know the truth about his mother’s life and reveals himself to be pretty dim when he says Tom Veryan has been her lover. She goes mad, wailing and begging him to stop. The reader/audience wonders what all the fuss is about – of course Tom was her lover!

Nicky makes a big claim that they’ve arrived at a crisis of their lives, and need to face it. He says he’s noticed lots of things about her but always suppressed them, heard lots of slander about her but always denied it etc.

The melodrama detector goes off the scale as Nicky warns that if they’re not careful something terrible might happen? What exactly? Finally, Nicky bullies Florence into admitting that Tom was her lover. And there were others before him. She’s in tears, he’s yelling. But she pleads that she’s different from other women, she has a ‘temperament’. But he says that’s just self-serving flannel.

‘You’re deceiving yourself—your temperament’s no different from thousands of other women, but you’ve been weak and selfish and given way all along the line—’

He blames her for the fact he’s ‘grown up all wrong’ and it’s all her fault. When she claims she’s provided him with a safe home he laughs bitterly and says it’s just a den for her endless amusements and distractions.

‘You’ve given me nothing all my life—nothing that counts.’

He in turn says that finding out about her philandering has all been a great shock (really?), but now he knows the truth he ‘means to get it right’. The speeches suddenly become substantial.

I’m not angry a bit. I realize that I’m living in a world where things like this happen—and they’ve got to be faced and given the right value. If only I’d had the courage to realize everything before—it wouldn’t be so bad now. It’s the sudden shock that’s thrown the whole thing out of focus for me—but I mean to get it right. Please help me!

You’ve wanted love always—passionate love, because you were made like that. It’s not your fault—it’s the fault of circumstances and civilization; civilization makes rottenness so much easier. We’re utterly rotten—both of us——

How can we help ourselves? We swirl about in a vortex of beastliness. This is a chance—don’t you see—to realize the truth—our only chance.

He accuses her of narcissism and delivers some withering home truths:

‘It isn’t that you love him—that would be easier—you never love anyone, you only love them loving you—all your so-called passion and temperament is false—your whole existence had degenerated into an endless empty craving for admiration and flattery.’

And then hits her where it really hurts: pointing out that she is no longer young or beautiful but a painted lady with fake blonde hair. She collapses and says she can’t bear it any more and tells him to leave.

At which point he produces the little box and confesses that he takes drugs. He doesn’t even specify which ones though everyone assumes the little box has cocaine in it. Florence hysterically over-reacts, as if it’s the end of the world. She tosses the box out the window and warns him to stop taking drugs now, at which he breaks down in terrible tears and begs her to be different, begs her to be his mother for the first time in his life. And they find themselves in an embrace, telling each other they love each other. He has become her little boy again as she calms and comforts him, stroking his hair. And that’s their position as the curtain comes down.

Thoughts

And this was the hit which made Coward’s name, his breakthrough work which led theatres to reconsider earlier plays he’d submitted and had rejected? Wow. I watched the Granada TV production (see below) and was embarrassed for all concerned. Fancy having to make a living performing rubbish like this! What a mad farrago of over-wrought melodrama.

Maybe it has Freudian, Oedipal undertones. Maybe the portrayal of a boozy washed-up adulterous alcoholic mother defied all the moral values of the older generation. Maybe it was shocking to make one of the characters a cocaine addict (if that’s what Nicky truly is). Maybe, as I’ve read in numerous places, the entire schtick of Nicky’s cocaine addiction was in fact a metaphor for Nicky’s homosexuality. Yes, I’m sure articles and reviews can be written to expand on these obvious interpretations at tedious length.

But the actual experience of either reading or watching ‘The Vortex’ is to submit to a farrago or overwrought tripe! My heart was with Tom and Bunty. Pack up and leave this house of madness and go and live happy well-adjusted lives together somewhere else, anywhere else.

Michael Arlen

The Wikipedia article tells us that most West End theatre managers considered the subject matter too controversial to handle and so Coward:

abandoned attempts to convince West End managements, and arranged to stage the play at the Everyman Theatre, Hampstead, a fringe venue in north London. When the money for the production threatened to run out during rehearsals, Coward secured the necessary funding from his friend the author Michael Arlen.

Arlen had had a tremendous success earlier the same year (1924) with his bestselling novel The Green Hat, which is also about the scandalous goings-on of the upper classes, and which also contains references to cocaine. The difference in the two works is instructive. Arlen’s novel builds to an equally if not more melodramatic climax than the Coward play but, before it gets there, it contains numerous vivid and brilliant sentences, and is often very funny. It also takes a relaxed and humorous attitude to drugs:

She never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach. (The Green Hat, chapter 7)

Coward has neither of these attributes; neither really well-turned phrases nor real humour. Just a snappily modish attitude which, during the first two acts often makes you smile, but which in the final act degenerates into hysteria.

Cocaine

I’m still reeling from Florence’s hysterical over-reaction to Nicky’s production of his little box of drugs in fact to the issue of drugs in the play. Whenever you read about it, on the cover, in online summaries, in reviews of productions, they often refer to it as a daring play about drug addiction, but it simply isn’t. It’s a play about two hysterically self-involved narcissists. The cocaine connection – if indeed it is cocaine – is peripheral to the hysterical accusations which mother and son fling at each other in the final act. It is emphatically not a work about drug addiction, but in which the cocaine thing seems bolted on as a transitory extra.

And why the hysterical over-reaction? In his long, detailed and extremely enjoyable biography of Coward, Philip Hoare makes two points: 1) cocaine and heroin use was surprisingly common in the theatrical-arty-Bohemian circles Coward moved in in the early 1920s, and had leaked out into parts of wider society. So much so that an author like Michael Arlen could conisder it a subject for jokes (see above) rather than hysterical over-reaction.

2) And The Vortex wasn’t even the first play to address the subject. The sensational death from a drug overdose of the starlet Billie Carleton in 1918 was not only front page news in all the newspaper, and triggered a moral panic about drugs, but also a little wave of plays including Dope by Frank Price, Drug Fiends by Owen Jones, and The Girl Who Took Drugs by Aimée Grattan-Clyndes (Hoare, p.75).

1964 Granada TV production

This production comes with an affable introduction by Coward himself in which he makes clear how transformative this, his breakthrough play, was for the young actor and playwright. It also demonstrates what I’ve realised, that nothing he says is particularly funny in and of itself, in fact some of it would sound sad if voiced by a normal person. What is funny is his entire attitude, the wonderfully flippant persona he invented, the verbal trills and flourishes which make everything he says amusing, because of the way he says it, and his droll attitude towards himself, the theatre, the whole world. The works are a triumph of attitude over content.

Philip Hoare’s view

In his biography Philip Hoare writes:

The Vortex is simplistic, naive and shallow but it is also entertaining and well written, albeit with the facility and brilliance of effect which often disguise a slight work. The play also evinced his increasing economy of language which, as with Hay Fever, he had come to recognise as essential. It was a reaction, whether conscious or not, against the flowery, polysyllabic language of the previous generation. Verbose Edwardian and Victorian speech and prose had been replaced by short abbreviations. 1920s slang worked on such principles (the dialect of youth, to confuse the elders) and Coward assimiliated it. The result was a dramatic language drawing on Wilde, Pinero and Shaw, but his own. Noel had found his voice, one which became recognisable as ‘Cowardian’. (Noel Coward: A Biography by Philip Hoare, page 131)

As usual with Hoare, good interesting points. It was the discovery of the voice which mattered, not the ludicrously over-the-top subject matter. And yet, for all that it appears a strange combination of under-cooked comedy in the first two acts, topped off with ridiculous melodrama in the third, it defined the era.

For the younger generation, the 1920s was a period of neurosis; lthey saw a foreshortened future and the search for new sensation – whether through dancing (as new and faster steps succeeded one another), alcohol (ever nore sophisticated cocktails) or drugs – induced a frenzied hedonism in poor little rich girls and boys for whom ‘the craze for pleasure’ steadily grew. The Vortex is more than a nod at this culture; it defined it. (p.130)

That’s the point. There had been previous plays on the subject of drugs or Oedipal themes. The nervy, thin, wired over-the-topness of The Vortex, the very qualities that make it seem ludicrous today, were the qualities which touched umpteen nerves at the time and propelled Coward to fame and notoriety, as the authors of works which crystallise the feel and anxieties of their time so often do. Overnight it became the talk of the town. Everyone claimed to have been at the first night (24 November 1924) or to have attended the after-show party. He had arrived.

Meeting the Lord Chamberlain

Hoare recounts the amusing story that the Lord Chamberlain’s office was on the verge of not giving the play a licence to be performed but when Coward heard about it he insisted on a face-to-face meeting with the Lord Chamberlain (Lord Cromer), where he gave a reading of key scenes and explained that the play delivers an extremely moral message: both the dissolute mother and the drug addict son are shown to be utter wrecks. In fact claimed it was ‘little more than a noral tract’.

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Related links

• The Vortex online

Related reviews

• Noel Coward reviews