The Vortex

The Vortex is a play in three acts by the English writer and actor Noël Coward. The play depicts the sexual vanity of a rich, ageing beauty, her troubled relationship with her adult son, and drug abuse in British society circles after the First World War. The son's cocaine habit is seen by many critics as a metaphor for homosexuality, then taboo in Britain. Despite, or because of, its controversial content for the time, the play was Coward's first great commercial success.

The play premiered in November 1924 in London and played in three theatres until June 1925, followed by a British tour and a New York production in 1925–26. It has enjoyed several revivals and a film adaptation.

In the years after the First World War, pairings in England of older, upper class women and younger men were common. The idea for the play was put in Coward's mind by an incident at a nightclub. Grace Forster, the elegant mother of his friend Stewart Forster, was talking to a young admirer, when a young women said, in earshot of Coward and Forster, "Will you look at that old hag over there with the young man in tow; she's old enough to be his mother". Forster paid no attention, and Coward immediately went across and embraced Grace, as a silent rebuke to the young woman who had made the remark. The episode led him to consider how a "mother–young son–young lover triangle" might be the basis of a play.

To add to the dramatic effect of his play, Coward included a further source of conflict between the mother, Florence, and son, Nicky. Coward's friend and biographer Cole Lesley records, "this came easily to him from his unlikely pre-occupation … with the subject of drug addiction". To Nicky's explicit cocaine habit, the author added what many critics have seen as a gay sub-text. Coward's biographer Philip Hoare sees clues to Nicky's unconventional sexuality in his intimate friendship with John Bagot (an offstage character), and his implausible engagement to a brisk young woman, Bunty Mainwaring; Hoare describes her as "a 'beard', a guise of heterosexuality". When asked if she is pretty, Nicky answers, "I don't know – I haven't really noticed." Florence's lover Tom finds Nicky "effeminate". The literary critic John Lahr writes that Coward pushed at the prevailing moral boundaries of the day: "His straight-talking about homosexuality – the issue disguised as drug-taking in The Vortex and the code behind the frivolity in his great comedies – was as far as he could go."

Until 1968 the English theatre was subject to official censorship; plays had to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain's Office.The Vortex barely survived the censor's scrutiny, but Coward plead his case in person to the Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cromer. He persuaded Cromer that the play was "a moral tract", and despite reservations expressed to the Chamberlain by King George V and others, Cromer granted a licence.

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