The Vortex by Noël Coward
This is an early play by Noël Coward and not, although it has upsides, one of his best. The setting is a fine one. A famous beauty, someone who lives a life of continual triviality and bitchiness, surveys her life from a series of couches and sofas. All as her son returns home from a time spent studying the piano in Paris, and her personal life shows off a particular, desperate disarray.
Coward is very good at conjuring up this world: a world of constant entertainments masking inner emptiness and surface beauty hiding fear. People who are endlessly attending concerts or dances for something to do but affecting not to enjoy any of them. People who live apart from their husbands, the latter prematurely aged and confined to the country rather than the pleasures of town. Affairs for no reason other than to pretend time does not pass for them, too, as it does for other people.
Florence Lancaster is a socialite who is essentially out of control. Growing old, as all who are spared must, she refuses to accept it, to believe it.
I still feel young, she says to her friend Helen — as so many do at any age.
But how one feels is not the half of it, as Helen tells her — though I’ll be damned if Florence listens.
As Florence cuts a vicious swathe through her social circle — calling this or that singer dreadful, and this or that party terribly dull — she desires a false sort of sympathy. Not a sympathy for the life she has — one of painful psychic confusion and romantic avarice — but the life she fantasises about: the dream that she is simply too popular, too luminous, too surrounded by people desperate for her love and her favour, too generous a soul to turn them down, unable to call a halt on the hands reaching out to touch the hem of her illuminated gown.
Her husband, David, Florence has emasculated. He is a much older man than he was only a little time ago. And her affairs with younger men have driven him away. Florence and her husband share a son, Nicky, but they do not share a life. Florence’s husband seems a decent if ineffectual man. She is the power, the chaos, while he is the hollow centre.
It is when their son Nicky arrives, unexpectedly early, that things come to a head. Nicky had been studying music in Paris, and he has, he says to his mother, brought back a fiancee. She’s called, in one of those names that are a little too much cinnamon, Bunty Mainwaring — and she is unbearable. Unbearable to Florence because she is young and not deferential. (For vain mothers, the idea that a son might be of marriageable age — and interested in someone new — might be a very painful one.)
Unbearable to us because she, quite transparently, is an awful woman. She wants to write, of course, which is always a clue; and of course, she has nothing approaching affection for Nicky, who says he wants to be her husband.
Nicky is always playing on the piano, possibly as a way of avoiding his social responsibilities and awkward questions. It’s possible that the piano is all he has ever been good at. They are at a party, where Nicky’s playing intersperses with the gramophone. After a particular set-to, Nicky heads to the piano and doodles something, as if to settle his nerves. He is also a drug addict — or rather someone on the threshold of addiction. I believe this play was scandalous when it premiered, but the drug subplot appears quite late and is given quite sparse treatment to my taste. We do not know — partly because the Lord Chamberlain and theatrical censorship might not have permitted it — what Nicky’s cocaine use actually entails, nor how deep it has in him its grip.
His mother, when she finds out, is suitably aghast and afraid but of course, she has problems of her very own to deal with also.
This play is very easy to read. I got through it happily and contentedly. It zipped along very well. No one has the kind of long look-at-me speech which is not justified. The dialogue is sharp and not laboured.
The critic Kenneth Tynan said, only forty or so years on from its first appearance, that it was not so much stilted as high-heeled, but I disagree. Of course it is of its time. We want art to be of its time rather than daringly, terrifyingly relevant and urgent and all the other foolish words that poor critics use to praise new productions. Some of the hundred-year-old slang is a little impenetrable. But the drama’s thrusts, and its cuts, are clear.
It is not Coward’s best, but it was one of his earliest. An arrival, an advent. The bell sounding the appearance of a great talent, rarely equalled, never bettered.