One should by now be looking at plays of 60 years ago in the same light as restoration comedies, as if they had nothing to do with life as it is lived today. But it is not easy in the case of The Vortex, Noël Coward's first big success in 1924, which still strikes me, on a second viewing,  as glib, in the manner of many young authors, and slightly spurious, in the manner of somebody who wishes to cause something of a sensation.

 

What Philip Prowse, both director and designer, has done is to make it an exercise in style, almost a burlesque of the twenties, with one of his white decor schemes and archly exaggerated acting. Possibly this is the right way to tackle a play which is quite without heart and feeling. Not even in the last act when Florence Lancaster, spurned by her young lover, and her son Nicky, well on the path towards drug dependency, attempt to explain the way they feel -  in a considerable hurry, as though not to make the audience late for their supper - can a present-day audience feel involved. Florence's rampant nymphomania is smoothed away by calling it her "temperament"; Nicky's probable homosexuality is shrugged off as a young man's growing pains.

 

All the evidence is that Coward knew perfectly well what he wanted to say but dare not say it, which makes The Vortex a peculiarly unsatisfying play with an exploitative streak. Only Helen Saville, played by Anne Lambton, strikes one as a character with any, well, character - the others are there to do their author's bidding, a collection of queens and dragons, the vapid and the bumbling.

 

Of course, in Florence Lancaster Coward has written one of his great bravura roles, perhaps the best, and Maria Aitken, though to my mind too young and genuinely attractive for it, seizes it and teases out all its facets, of which there are regrettably few, selfishness being the most prominent. Rupert Everett as Nicky, wanders around looking vaguely intellectual and intensely unhappy but does manage to rise to the final crescendo adequately while still giving the impression of trading chiefly on his looks.