Lloyd Evans
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My brain groped for certainty amid a host of unfamiliar sensations: the eerie lighting, the chalky stink of fresh plasterwork, the whispers and shuffles of hidden performers, and the yielding creaks beneath my footfalls. I was nagged at by a constant fear that some new prank was about to be played on me. Anyone who has been arrested and interrogated by secret policemen must have endured something like this nervy, skin-crawling ordeal. I never thought I’d write these words but here goes. I hated this show. I couldn’t wait to escape. It was sheer torture. And for that reason, I declare it a triumph. It revealed an abiding truth about the twisted relationship between theatrical artists and their hapless patrons.
The Rose, in Kingston, is an architectural muddle. The beautifully proportioned seating area is marred by a cumbersome, overlarge acting space. This great barn is particularly hostile to drawing-room plays that need solid walls and credible furnishings to convey their atmosphere. Staging The Vortex here is quite a challenge. And then there’s the play. Noël Coward’s breakthrough hit from 1924 is a provocative, morbid, self-pitying melodrama, quite unlike anything he later produced. The comedy is acidic. The atmosphere is fretful and sour. The characters buzz around like clever, brittle hornets plunging their stings into each other’s hides. All the charm in the world is never enough to sweeten the atmosphere and to remove its air of mawkish cruelty. Remember, this was not written by the great Sir Noël Coward, the nation’s favourite wag, but by an angry young Bohemian spiv, a chancer with no reputation at all, who wanted to smash the bourgeoisie in the face with his elegant, velvet-clad fist.
The plot is a tangled romance between Florence, an ageing cougar, and her young toyboy, Tom. Their affair implodes when Florence’s son Nicky returns from Paris with his new fiancée Bunty, who happens to be Tom’s former girlfriend. Nicky is addicted to ‘drugs’ (code for homosexuality) and the play culminates in a scene of rapturous exhibitionism as Nicky and Florence confess their vices to one another and agree to end their compulsive behaviour. This finale never feels entirely convincing.
There are strong performances in Stephen Unwin’s production but they make the show lopsided. The star turn is James Dreyfus, playing a catty old woofter, but the role is too small for an actor of his calibre and his absences from the stage deprive the show of energy and fun. Kerry Fox is all right as Florence, the whingey nympho sleeping her way through Sandhurst, but she suggests too little of her character’s sensuality and erotic adventurism. David Dawson, who may become a star, captures Nicky’s sexual ambivalence brilliantly but he over-stresses the character’s aggrieved bitterness at the cost of lightness and frivolity. William Chubb is excellent as the dreary upstanding husband whom Florence rejects in favour of cadets half her age.
If I lived in Kingston, I’d regard this as a pretty good night out. Were I further afield, I wouldn’t be so sure.
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