| The Vortex | Factory Space Theatre Company |
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 The 24-year-old Coward had to use all his guile, talent and charm to persuade the Lord Chamberlain, who then had absolute powers of theatrical censorship, not to ban the Vortex for its look at drug taking and at the incestuous relation between mother and son. Today there is no danger of censorship, but the piece retains its power to amuse, engage and confront.
Directed by Roz Riley ( Artistic director of The Factory Space Theatre Company – resident at the Star of the Sea in Manly) Design by Hecate.
One of the mysterious things about Noel Coward, and one of the sure indications that he is a great writer, is that he constantly surprises his audience. The play begins as a bitchy light comedy, but over the three acts the mood becomes ever darker, so that by the end we are presented with a drug-addled and effete young man confronting his mother about her serial adulteries with lovers half her age in a dramatic passage that owes much to Hamlet’s anguished “closet scene” with Gertrude.
Nicky Lancaster has been studying piano in the hectic dissonance of Paris and now returns to his beloved mother, the charismatic and spoilt, Florence in their London town house. He brings the shadows of sex, drugs and French rock and roll. He also brings a new fiancée. But it is his relationship with his mother that is at the heart of the play, and is what gives the play its moral power.
This relationship is, in a sense, a dysfunctional, disturbing and destructive romance. Nicky is a son whose mother takes younger lovers, young men of his own age. It is his mother’s voracious sexual desire, her “vortex of beastliness”, that engulfs and overpowers Nicky, driving his addiction to drugs and the final knockdown confrontation with Florence. Like Coward’s ‘Private Lives’ after it,’ the Vortex’ prefers the wild and selfish bohemian to the staid moralist, but realises that these pleasures are purchased at a high price.
Coward has complicated most of the possible romantic entanglements by suggesting the spiritual uneasiness and implicit gayness of would-be musician, Nicky. Florence’s unmarried ‘best friend’, Helen seems to be driven by thwarted lesbian passion. Pawnie (Quentin Pauncefoot) is a waspish socialite leaving no doubt of his sexual inclinations.
Can the beautiful and the damned find a way to be happy?
Factory Space Theatre Company
The Vortex
By Noel Coward
Directed by Roz Riley
Starring Cat Martin, Julian Kennard, Mitchell McDermott, Lyndall Iron, David Kirkham, Isla Borrell, John Benjamin, Bianca Howard
Venue: Star of the Sea Theatre, MANLY
Dates: September 20th to October 11th
Times: Thursdays, Fridays, Saturdays at 7.30
Matinee: Sunday 28th September 3pm matinee
Tickets: $30 / $25
Bookings: 9439 1906
The Factory Space Theatre Company has been producing independent professional theatre for the last 12 years and is now resident at the Star of the Sea in Manly
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