Newsnight Review discussed a revival of Noel Coward¹s 1920s shocker The Vortex.

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(Edited highlights of the panel's review)

MARK LAWSON:
In 1924, Coward had to plead with the sensors to get this on because it was considered shocking. It is not now, but does it still have some power?

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
Unfortunately not, but that is the fault of the production. We know Coward's plays are protected, but this is an ordinary dull Coward. Chiwetel Ejiofor does his best, but he is forced to play hysterically all the way through. When you get to the final scene that cannot work, because in the final scene you are all guns blazing, there is nowhere to go. That is the fault of the production. Bette Bourne is great, playing the homosexual, Chiwetel Ejiofor is wonderful, Francesca Annis does her best, but always let down by the production. Surely there is a way in the 21st century to look at Coward and make him as sharp, sassy and relevant as he was it then.

IAN RANKIN:
It is an odd choice of play. Having said that, this was the first time I had seen Noel coward in the theatre and it was a revelation because the first two acts were a lot of public glitter, but it darkens considerably in the third act. It is like a long day's journey into a private darkness. I was reminded curiously of Eugene O'Neill in the last act, because it was a doper's son who had not made much of himself confronting his deluded mother. The dialogue got muscular in the last act. It is a play about smoking. This play has been bought on by Forrester, because you could not put it on anywhere but Britain because you cannot smoke in America. The funniest line in the play is when someone said, "Where's Nicky?" "Oh, he's in the smoking room." The entire auditorium by this point was full of smoke. It was like watching the play through a fog. It was brilliant if you have the patches on, take them off and go and see the play.

MARK LAWSON:
This is what is known as colour blind casting, we are not supposed to take notice of the fact, and no-one does in the play, that a black man has two white parents. Can it work?

PHILLIP HENSHER:
It is a strange thing to do in a realist play. You forget a decision like that quickly, it stopped troubling me after a bit. Like the others I was more troubled by the play. I think it looks more modern than it is. The dilemmas look fairly 1990ish with all the cocaine and adultery, but the solutions are preposterously 1920s. There is a problem with a Noel Coward play without jokes in it. Without the wit or the comic bravado, you are left with howling misogyny and long conversations about whether she loves him more than he loves her. I am sure we all agree it is a subject beneath our contempt.

MARK LAWSON:
On the casting, it hadn't bothered me when Adrian Leicester played Hamlet, but it seemed problematic to me here because it is about social observation and attitudes towards other people. It changes the nature of the play at points, because this man is astonished that his mother has had an affair. Yet what you're looking at would have been one of the explanations for what happened.

JEANETTE WINTERSON:
I think Michael Grandage was nervous, he did not know how to do it in a way to make an impact. I think the casting was gratuitous in the wrong way, it does not help the actors or the production. You do notice it, I could not stop noticing it.

PHILLIP HENSHER:
I was the same, because he shouts:
"mother, look at me, I'm different from you", and you go, "yeah, colour-wise to start with". I never did get past that. I also thought the sexual ambiguity that Noel Coward would have brought to the role was missing, because in this production he is played too straight.