Charles: It’s certainly astonishing how quickly one becomes disillusioned over everything.
(Charles Burleigh voicing the disillusion of the post-war generation)
SARAH: Lari dear, what’s happened?
LARITA: Lots and lots and lots of things.
Immediately, this feels like a different read from The Vortex, Fallen Angels or Hay Fever because the play directions are much longer and more descriptive. They are more like the extensive descriptions of Bernard Shaw which not only describe the scene but give psychological portraits of the characters. Nowhere near as bloated as Shaw, but fuller than the short, sweet introductions to the three works I mentioned.
The action of the play takes place in the hall of Colonel Whittaker’s house in the country.
Executive summary
Young John Whittaker marries Larita, a divorcee and brings her home to live, to the horror of his narrow-minded mother. Three months later, Larita is going out of her mind with boredom and is triggered by the family’s dislike of her into a Nora Helmer-level diatribe against their sexually repressed narrow-mindedness. In the third act, Larita appears at Mrs Whittaker’s big society dance in all her finery, squashes her enemies, promises to one day meet again her few allies, then leaves forever (in her own car, with her own maid).
Author’s intention
According to the Wikipedia article, in his autobiography, ‘Present Indicative’, Coward said that his object in writing ‘Easy Virtue’ was to present a comedy in the structure of a tragedy in order ‘to compare the déclassée woman of to-day with the more flamboyant demi-mondaine of the 1890s’. Like a lot of what Coward said about his own plays, this sounds impressive but is, in the end, not particularly useful in helping you read or respond to the play.
Act 1
In the first part of Act 1 the Whittaker family – affable Colonel James ‘Jim’ Whittaker, strict and easily offended Mrs Whittaker, fat plain religious eldest daughter Marion, and excitable brainless Hilda – await the return of the son, John, who has jilted his jolly nice local fiancée, Sarah Hurst, met someone while staying in the South of France, and married her, all without their ever meeting his bride.
John telegrams to say he’ll be arriving this morning i.e. later in this act. Lots of excited speculation among the daughters, with Mrs Whittaker affecting to be offended by her son’s high-handedness. Several times she refers to what seem to be affairs her husband, the Colonel, has had.
COLONEL: Your mother stood by me through my various lapses from grace with splendid fortitude.
Mrs W doesn’t quite say ‘Men! They’re all the same’ but it’s strongly implied. And emphasised by a minor sub-plot in which we learn that plain eldest humourless daughter, Marion, was jilted by her fiancée, Edgar, who appears to have gone abroad for some time to avoid her. It seems that that was the moment when she discovered she had a religious vocation and was ‘above’ things like love and – ugh – sex!
MRS WHITTAKER: All my life I’ve had to battle and struggle against this sort of thing. First your father—and now John—my only son. It’s breaking my heart.
MARION: We must just put our trust in Divine Providence, dear.
Despite or because of this, the Colonel is the most relaxed and tolerant of the family. Coward makes the traditional connection between being sexually uptight and moralistic intolerance in the opening description of the characters before the play proper has even begun.
Mrs Whittaker, attired in a tweed skirt, shirt-blouse, and a purple knitted sports-coat, is seated at her bureau. She is the type of woman who has the reputation of having been ‘quite lovely’ as a girl. The stern repression of any sex emotions all her life has brought her to middle age with a faulty digestion which doesn’t so much sour her temper as spread it. She views the world with the jaundiced eyes of a woman who subconsciously realizes she has missed something, which means in point of fact that she has missed everything.
Uptight sexuality = sour temper = bitter sense of having missed out.
Hilda phones Sarah to say John’s coming home and she (Sarah) says she’ll pop over to see old John again and meet the new bride, and that she’ll bring one of the guests currently staying at the Hurst family home, a Charles Burleigh.
John finally arrives, says hello to his family, then introduces his new wife, Larita.
She is tall, exquisitely made-up and very beautiful—above everything, she is perfectly calm. Her clothes, because of their simplicity, are obviously violently expensive; she wears a perfect rope of pearls and a small close traveling-hat.
It’s only now that he reveals that this is Larita’s second marriage. Mrs Whittaker primly asks when her first husband died, but Larita airily explains that he didn’t, he divorced her. John has married a divorcee! She goes on to explain that he beat her so she ran away, according to John: ‘He was an absolute devil.’
Mrs Whittaker is profoundly shocked. Her daughters try to explain that nowadays manners are more relaxed, that ‘social barriers are not quite so strongly marked now’ and ‘everybody’s accepted so much more—I mean nobody minds so much about people…’ but to no avail. Her upset comes out in acid remarks which, I suppose, can be played for laughs.
COLONEL: Larita’s an extraordinarily pretty name.
MRS WHITTAKER: Excellent for musical comedy.
Now the playwright arranges entrances and exits. Hilda takes Larita upstairs to the room they’ve prepared for her and Mrs W claims to have a headache and is taken to her room by Marion – which leaves John alone with his father to have a chat. This exchange confirms that Larita is notably older than John and therefore it’s doubtful that they’ll have children. His father gently regrets that the family name will as a consequence expire.
At the end of this little chat John runs upstairs to see his love and the Colonel goes into the library, leaving the stage empty. The (female) servant, Furber, now brings in two arrivals, Sarah Hurst and her guest Charles Burleigh.
- Sarah is boyish and modern and attractive.
- Charles is a pleasant-looking man somewhere between thirty and forty.
Sarah asks the servant, Furber, where the family is and he explains their various locations. It immediately becomes obvious that Charles has a satirical sense of humour, which Sarah enjoys trying to quell.
CHARLES: I suppose this is a slightly momentous day in the lives of the Whittakers.
SARAH: Very momentous.
CHARLES: Is your heart wrung with emotion?
SARAH: Don’t be a beast, Charles.
Presumably this is all played for laughs. Sarah explains to him that she and John were never officially engaged and she’s had 3 months to get over the news of being dumped. In fact she genuinely finds the whole thing funny and predicts how funny it will be to observe starchy old Mrs Whittaker’s reaction.
Hilda comes pelting downstairs, greets Sarah, says it’s all too howlingly exciting and insists on dragging her out to the garage because a) she’s got to tell the chauffeur something and b) she can fill Sarah in on all the juicy details on the way.
This is all done to leave Charles alone and feeling embarrassed, doubly so when Larita comes down the stairs. The scene is arranged like this because after some embarrassing small talk they discover that they’ve got a mutual friend in Paris, Cecile de Vriaac, and this opens the floodgates. Larita realises Cecile has shown her photographs which included Charles, they have numerous other friends in common, and they open the latest edition of Tatler which is lying about in the hall, and start swapping the gossip about all their posh pals and their relationships.
Returning to the subject of John, she is able to speak freely to someone her own age and tells Charles she was attracted by John’s youth and ingenuousness. Doesn’t sound like a long-lasting basis for a marriage, does it?
At which point Mrs W, Marion and John come downstairs. Mrs W is even more mortified to discover another stranger in the house (Charles) and getting on like a house on fire with the resented daughter-in-law, Larita. Then Hilda and Sara re-enter. Everyone shakes hands and Furber announces that lunch is served.
Act 2
Three months later, summer. Larita is lazing on the sofa smoking and pretending to read. Mrs Whittaker enters and asks her why she isn’t playing tennis with everyone else. It’s clear they have arrived at a frosty detente. Mrs W is fretting about the big dance she’s organising for tonight (I’m guessing this will be the setting for Act 3 and various revelations!).
MRS WHITTAKER: I’m quite used to all responsibilities of this sort falling on to my shoulders. The children are always utterly inconsiderate. Thank Heaven, I have a talent for organization.[She goes out with a martyred expression.]
John rushes in to fetch a sweater for tennis, he’s playing a match with her. Larita asks him to fetch her a fur coast since she’s cold. No wonder, if you lay around all day indoors. When he’s gone we see that Larita is crying. She is very unhappy.
The Colonel comes in, observes this, and tries to cheer her up by playing a game of bézique farcically badly. She admits that she’s excruciatingly bored. He sympathises and says why doesn’t she suggest to John that they move up to London. Suddenly she bursts out that the whole thing has been a complete failure and runs out. The Colonel lights a cigarette.
Marion comes in fussing about the lanterns they’re setting up for the dance. She notices Larita was reading a book by Proust and calls it ‘silly muck’. There’s a little reprise of the sex theme started in Coward’s description of Mrs W as sexually uptight. Marion, remember, is an earnest Christian, I think a Catholic.
MARION: All French writers are the same—sex, sex—sex. People think too much of all that sort of tosh nowadays, anyhow. After all, there are other things in life.
COLONEL: You mean higher things, don’t you, Marion? much higher?
MARION: I certainly do—and I’m not afraid to admit it.
Marion and Mrs Whittaker, the two bigots, agree how awful Larita is and how she won’t join in the games. Then they both criticise the Colonel for pandering to her and entertaining her. Ghastly man.
The others come in from the tennis and Hilda complains that Larita was making eyes at her partner, Philip (a callow, lanky youth’). The others disappear off, to plan the seating plan or whatnot, as a pretext to leave John alone with Sarah. It becomes clear that he’s not exactly still attracted to her but likes her company, asks her to keep dances for him this evening. He’s surprised that Sarah and Lari get on so well but Sarah explains that Lari is intelligent and so is bored. Being dim himself, John doesn’t understand. Sarah makes a joke of it by saying she’s growing up but John isn’t.
All this banter leads up to John revealing that he still lover her. He realises he wanted staid friendship she offers rather than the rush of cosmopolitan excitement he liked in Lari. Sarah is appalled and tells him to shut up.
Lari re-enters and after some polite chat, Hilda, Sarah and Philip exit to play more tennis, leaving Lari and John alone. if you think of it schematically, we’ve had Lari and the Colonel which made it clear how bored and unhappy Lari is; followed by Sarah and John, showing how unhappy and regretful John is. Now, knowing both their situations, we have John and Lari confronting each other. Or will they?
They really are unsuited. When she makes jokes or ironic remarks he just doesn’t get them and thinks she’s ‘twitting’ him. No real communication is possible and this develops into a real argument. They both accuse the other of stopping loving them and both deny it. What’s interesting to the viewer is that it’s not a case of stopping loving each other so much as that the so-called ‘love’ was really based on a profound mismatch of temperaments and they are only now realising it. The ‘love’ masked it. The fading of the initial infatuation is now revealing it, like the tide going out.
Larita sounds the sexual repression theme again:
LARITA: Marion is gratuitously patronizing.
JOHN: She’s nothing of the sort.
LARITA: Her religious views forbid her to hate me openly.
JOHN: It’s beastly of you to say things like that.
LARITA: I’m losing my temper at last—it’s a good sign.
JOHN: I’m glad you think so.
LARITA: I’ve repressed it for so long, and repression’s bad. Look at Marion.
JOHN: I don’t know what you mean.
LARITA: No—you wouldn’t.
‘Repression’s bad’, can this be attributed solely to Freud’s influence or was it proposed by numerous other outlets to become part of the Zeitgeist? Anyway, Larita speaks her truth:
LARITA: I’ve been watching your passion for me die. I didn’t mind that so much; it was inevitable. Then I waited very anxiously to see if there were any real love and affection behind it—and I’ve seen the little there was slowly crushed out of you by the uplifting atmosphere of your home and family. Whatever I do now doesn’t matter any more—it’s too late… You’re miles away from me already.
This argument goes on for a long time making crystal clear that John doesn’t get Larita at all. When he suggests going away, to Venice or Algeria, she laughs and says they can stay with some friends of hers who she met in New York. This opens up fathoms between them as John realises that he knows next to nothing about her life before they met or her first husband, Francis.
Anyway, somehow – rather implausibly in my view – this long sometimes quite bitter argument circles round to them apologising and forgiving each other. She powders her nose. He kisses her. She tells him to push off back to his damn tennis.
He’s barely exited before Marion enters. Because that’s how theatre works. Theatre is unavoidably stagey.
Marion wants to have a girl-to-girl talk which is, of course, a bad move because she is thick and sexually repressed and religiously bigoted while Larita is a sexually frank woman of the world. the comedy consists in Marion’s extended lack of awareness. She asks Larita to stop leading her father, the Colonel, on, which of course outrages Larita. When Marion goes on to say that she thinks she helped to ‘save’ Edgar from his ‘immoral’ i.e. sexually open, ways, Larita eventually explodes and is just telling Marion what a revolting hypocrite she is when skinny Philip comes in.
Philip tells her that, as well as the twelve guests invited for dinner, ten more will arrive afterwards for the dance, and asks if he can dance with her. Then if he can sit on the sofa beside her. He’s obviously smitten with this exotic creature while Larita just finds him funny.
LARITA: I’m sorry—but you are rather funny.
PHILIP [Gloomy.] Everyone says that.
So Philip is comic relief. Larita mocks him, quoting high-minded phrases we’ve just seen Marion using at her, about living ‘a straight and decent life’. When the boob is thoroughly confused she gets up but Philip grabs her hand preparatory to making some declaration of love. She furiously pulls it back just as Hilda enters through the French windows and sees it. She takes this as confirming everything she thinks about Larita as a flirt, while Larita is infuriated to be surrounded by all these dolts.
Sarah and John enter after finishing their tennis match and Mrs Whittaker comes absent-mindedly downstairs. Sarah grabs Philip’s hand and says they need to go back to her parents’ house to change for dinner.
As they all sit down to tea Hilda drops loads of bitter remarks about Larita and then says she found Larita ‘canoodling’ with Philip on the sofa. Larita is infuriated, the Colonel tells his child to shut up, but Hilda then goes to a book on the shelves and extracts a cutting from the Times and hands it round the whole family.
The bigots (Hilda, Marion, Mrs Whittaker) instantly see it as shame and outrage. The Colonel reads it and says it is nothing to do with them what Larita did before she married John. The bigots say that’s typical, just the kind of thing they’d expect from ‘his sort’.
At this moment Mr Harris arrives, the Cockney workman who’s due to set up the coloured lights in the garden. The point of the scene is that Mrs Whittaker is too distressed to talk to him and Marion is holding and comforting her but Larita briskly tells the little workman exactly where the lights should go (strung between the four trees and decorating the arch), checking with the Colonel who affably confirms. So then Harris goes out to get on with the work.
This makes Mrs Whittaker even more insensate with rage and she boils over when she tells Larita to go to her room like a naughty schoolgirl and Larita says, Certainly not, I haven’t finished my tea yet. In fact she insists on staying and clearing up any misapprehensions. Again there’s a direct stab at Marion, when she says:
MARION: In the face of everything, I’m afraid there’s very little room for misapprehension.
LARITA: Your life is built up on misapprehensions, Marion. You don’t understand or know anything—you blunder about like a lost sheep.
Only now does Larita leak out what was in the newspaper cutting. Apparently it linked her with the suicide of a man she’d spurned, and attributed a long list of lovers to her. She says only two on the list ever actually loved her and the suicide killed himself out of his own weakness. When the Colonel says maybe they ought not to be too hasty in judging Larita, Mrs Whittaker predictably tells him he’s let her down countless times and is doing it again, to which Larita delivers an Author’s Message kind of speech:
LARITA: The Colonel’s not failing you—it’s just as bad for him as for you. You don’t suppose he likes the idea of his only son being tied up to me, after these revelations? But somehow or other, in the face of overwhelming opposition, he’s managed to arrive at a truer sense of values than you could any of you ever understand. He’s not allowed himself to be cluttered up with hypocritical moral codes and false sentiments—he sees things as they are, and tries to make the best of them. He’s tried to make the best of me ever since I’ve been here.
And when Mrs Whittaker calls her a wicked woman:
LARITA: That remark was utterly fatuous and completely mechanical. You didn’t even think before you said it—your brain is so muddled up with false values that you’re incapable of grasping anything in the least real.
She’s turning into Nora Helmer from Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. She goes on to state that she loves John (the only member of the Whittaker family not present) but it’s not working out.
LARITA: Unfortunately—I can see through him –he’s charming and weak and inadequate, and he’s brought me down to the dust.
And then delivers a frontal blast at Marion:
LARITA: It is what I mean—entirely. I’m completely outside the bounds of your understanding—in every way. And yet I know you, Marion, through and through—far better than you know yourself. You’re a pitiful figure, and there are thousands like you—victims of convention and upbringing. All your life you’ve ground down perfectly natural sex impulses, until your mind has become a morass of inhibitions—your repression has run into the usual channel of religious hysteria. You’ve placed physical purity too high and mental purity not high enough, And you’ll be a miserable woman until the end of your days unless you readjust the balance.
Marion stalks into the library and slams the door. Mrs Whittaker retreats upstairs. The Colonel tries to be conciliatory but Larita tells him to be quiet. Hilda rushes over in tears asking to be forgiven, but Lari tells her not to be such ‘a little toad’ so she runs into the garden.
Then, alone on stage, she tries to calm herself, picks up the Proust and lays on the sofa. But she can’t focus and flings the book at a revolting replica statuette of the Venus de Milo, knocking it to the floor where it smashes. I’d have thought it would be quite hard for any actor to achieve this pinpoint book-throwing feat at the end of such an extended passionate set of speeches.
And so the curtain falls on a long and exhausting second act.
Act 3
The dance, of course. Lots of Young People exchanging meaningless banter. We learn that Larita has stayed in her bedroom as Mrs Whittaker commanded her. The guests notice how out of sorts the Whittakers are. Charles makes the obvious point:
CHARLES: They’re a tiresome family.
SARAH: Very.
Which I realised is also true in spades of the Bliss family in ‘Hay Fever’ and the grotesque Lancaster family in ‘The Vortex’. From one point of view these early Coward plays are all about tiresome families. Charles makes the equally obvious point that ‘She’s all wrong here—right out of the picture.’ What puzzles him is why anyone as intelligent as her ever married such a dimwit as John.
Abruptly Charles proposes to Sarah. Now in ten thousand Victorian novels this is the climax of the whole narrative, but here Coward shows his modish 1920s ways by having Sarah laugh, say of course not and then for the pair of them to rationally analyse why it probably wouldn’t work. They’re good friends, they like spending time together, but marriage would kill all that.
SARAH: Marriage would soon kill all that—without the vital spark to keep it going.
CHARLES: Dear, dear, dear. The way you modern young girls talk—it’s shocking, that’s what it is!
SARAH: Never mind, Charles dear, you must move with the times.
In other words they’re positioned here as an intelligent and self-aware contrast with the lack of awareness plaguing John and Larita’s union.
There’s delicious farce when, just as Mrs Whittaker is telling Mrs Hurst, Sarah and Mrs Phillips that Larita is upstairs in bed with a blinding headache and must be allowed to rest, the girl herself appears at the top of the stairs.
(Stairs, especially with a kind of balcony or gallery leading to them, are vital elements in a farce stage. It is from the top of the stairs that Florence Lancaster sees her beau Tom Veryan kissing young Bunty Mainwaring in The Vortex; it’s from the top of the stairs that Judith Bliss sees her husband David kissing sexy Myra Arundel in Hay Fever; and it’s from the top of the stairs that Larita makes her dramatic entrance to the dance in Easy Virtue.)
She is dressed to kill and proceeds to flout all the restrictions placed on her activity and attitude, telling Mrs Whittaker to her face that she was lying about Larita’s headache, telling Marion to get out of her way or she’ll squash her, ordering Johnnie to run off and fetch her champagne.
For people her equal in intelligence and sophistication – Sarah and Charles – she is witty and sociable. When John says she’s over-dressed she tells him to go and dance with someone if he can’t be nice to her.
The Whittaker women go into a little huddle to share their poisonous whispers. Charles is impressed and tells Sarah the end is nigh (he actually says, this is the swan song). John is utterly perplexed. He doesn’t know what’s come over Larita because nobody has told him about the enormous row that afternoon.
After a dance Larita finds herself sitting with Charles and they agree that they have the same kinds of minds and talk the same kind of language. She confesses that marrying John was a huge mistake. Also the most cowardly thing she’s ever done. She was running away. As she puts it in a comic speech:
LARITA: I can look round with a nice clear brain and see absolutely no reason why I should love John. He falls short of every ideal I’ve ever had—he’s not particularly talented or clever; he doesn’t know anything, really; he can’t talk about any of the things I consider it worthwhile to talk about; and, having been to a good school he’s barely educated.
Charles tells her he can bet how this will end (Larita and John divorce) but Larita tells him to shush. All through this dialogue, Bright Young Things are moving backwards and forwards, laughing and drinking and the band is playing. After Charles leaves, young puppy Hugh Petworth comes to ask her to dance but Lari easily spots that he’s been put up to it by his friend for a bet and sends him packing.
Sarah comes over. Lari tells her candidly that she’s leaving tonight, forever. When Lari tells her about the argument this afternoon triggered by Hilda showing her family the Times cutting Sarah tells her Hilda showed it to her three days ago and Sarah made her promise not to share it. The little beast!
She realises John has had enough of her. It was always only calf love. She should never have come. She’s out of place. In their eyes she has shamed their family. best for everyone if she leaves.
Lari tells Sarah to look after John, meaning marry him. She should have and would have if Lari hadn’t come along. Sarah is abashed but says she’ll try. They’re interrupted by John coming in and apologising and asking her to dance. She says she can’t, has a headache, is going back up to bed, then says goodbye in a particularly final way. As John starts to ask what she means, Lari tells Sarah to take him for another dance and thus gets rid of him.
Furber arrives to announce that her car is ready. Her maid, Louise, has packed and loaded all her things and is in the car waiting. Lari takes one last look out the window onto the veranda where the party is in full swing then turns and walks out the front door.
THE END.
Sexual repression
Coward explicitly attributes Mrs Whittaker’s sour temper to her sexual repression. Marion also is severely repressed, and disappointed by her fiancé chucking her, which explains why she has taken to religion, as sublimation and consolation.
With this clearly established it is, then, funny whenever either of them attributes their sourness or strictness to higher morals than the others, as both Mrs W and Marion attempt to do, so we laugh when Marion, with astonishing lack of self awareness, tells Larita:
MARION: No one could be more broad-minded than I am.
It’s funny not only because it signals her complete lack of self awareness, but because it belongs to a type, it confirms her type, she is precisely the kind of obtuse, plain, bigoted person who would have to even say something like that. Indeed the fact that she has to say it disproves it, rather like the joke phrase of our time ‘I’m not a racist but…’ There mere fact that you have to say it…
So the play lines up two teams, the sexually confident and aware ones (Larita, the Colonel, Charles) and the sexually repressed and uptight ones (Mrs Whittaker, Marion).
But the attitude-to-sex binary is reinforced by or part of another binary, between the clever and the stupid: Mrs Whittaker, Marion and John (alas) are stupid, humourless, slow on the uptake, some references, jokes or subjects go clean over their heads; while Larita, the Colonel and Sarah are not only more relaxed about sex but are simply more intelligent.
Greater intelligence = more frank and candid attitude towards sex.
Lower intelligence = sexual intolerance and religious bigotry.
Which is all brought out and made explicit in Larita’s tremendous speeches at the end of Act 2.
Easy virtue
So I suppose that is that the entire play turns out to be about: Larita accusing Mrs Whittaker and Marion of choosing the path of easy virtue. How easy it is to be sanctimonious, superior and self-satisfied with your own moral superbness if you have never lived, never dared or risked anything. What tiny but ‘pure’ lives you will lead.
Compared to Larita who has lived a more full, complicated, difficult and challenging life, with many more moral choices in it, not all of which she has necessarily got right.
But better to live a full if ‘morally compromised’ life, than a long, narrow and frustrated one.
Thoughts
It’s a less well-known Coward play and, apparently, not staged very often, partly because of the large cast in the final act – but I liked it more than the more regularly staged The Vortex, Fallen Angels or Hay Fever. There are some laughs, some sharp ironic moments along the way, but it was the diversity and plausibility of the characters I liked, and their many nicely observed interactions.
All characters in plays have to be broad brush caricatures, they have to be established very quickly for the audience to understand what’s going on – that’s the great drawback of theatre compared with the novel which can explore characters and events with far more subtlety.
And so the figures of the strict and disapproving mother, the more relaxed and sympathetic father, the religious zealot daughter, the jolly hockeysticks daughter, the dim son, the worldly and sophisticated divorcee who makes an unlikely friendship with the clever girl she supplanted – all these are types we instantly recognise from countless other dramas, plays, TV shows, sitcoms, movies and what not.
But I just enjoyed their interplay. I think Coward does it well. The Vortex is madly over-the-top. Hay Fever is a broad and implausible farce (hence its popularity). Fallen Angels is funny in concept but not so much in delivery. Whereas ‘Easy Virtue’ delivers – not laughs – but enjoyably recognisable exchanges in every scene. For example the scene where the Colonel tries to cheer Larita up by offering to play cards badly with her. That felt sweet and plausible.
And then the extraordinary Confrontation Scene at the end of Act 2, with Lari doing her Nora Helmer impression and delivering some home truths to the stiflingly small-minded bourgeois family.
The relaxed, sophisticated bonhomie between Charles and Sarah, the genuine understanding between Charles and Lari, the genuine friendship which springs up between Lari and Sarah… Everything in the Vortex felt, to me, forced and strained. Everything in this play felt plausible and beautifully imagined.
Movies
The play has been made into two movies: a 1928 black-and-white silent version, directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
And a lavish 2008 version starring housewife’s favourite, Colin Firth and glamorous Jessica Biel in the Larita role.
Books & Boots 