Review: The Vortex in Chichester offers brilliant showcase for real-life mother and son

A scintillating and prolonged final scene is the perfect showcase for real-life mother and son Lia Williams and Joshua James playing an on-stage mother and son in Daniel Raggett’s revival of Noël Coward’s first commercial success very nearly a century after it was first performed.

Superbly acted, it’s the scene that gives the play almost its entire emotional impact after a first two-thirds which leave you slightly underwhelmed by the piece’s deliberate triviality.

As one of the characters says early on, another character off-stage is insufferably persuaded that she matters. The same might be said for everyone here until that final scene which is provocative, intense and moving. The point is that it is also terrifically acted. Whether the fact that we are looking at real-life mother and son adds anything is, of course, the great unquantifiable, but there is no doubt that they spark off each other brilliantly as wastrel son confronts wastrel mother charging her with the sheer emptiness of her version of motherhood.

These are fascinating, damaged and damaging characters, Williams’s Florence Lancaster surrounded by hangers-on as she battles the years with a tragic pursuit of men half her age. James’s Nicky, on the other hand, knows that drugs are claiming him. They both know that they have both got to turn the corner. Whether they have got either the ability or indeed the true inclination is the thought that you will travel home with. There’s a dance of death to their final scene. This isn’t Coward at his most spiffing and witty; it’s sad and hugely absorbing – and Lia Williams and Joshua James are outstanding. So much so that pretty much everything and everyone else seems mere padding to their personal drama.

Priyanga Burford gives us something genuinely interesting as the friend Helen Saville, a hanger-on yes, but someone prepared to tell Florence how it is and just what she might doing to herself. However, as my late grandfather used to like to say, she might as well save her breath to cool her porridge.

The crisis comes when Nicky returns home with an unexpected girlfriend. Possibly a cover. Who knows? Plenty of people believe his drugs habit is some kind of metaphor for his homosexuality – not that that’s a theory that adds terribly much to anything. For the moment, the big problem – and this takes some thinking about – is that his girlfriend is actually his mother’s young lover’s ex. Small wonder her arrival brings things to a head. Florence is trapped in her empty social whirl, endlessly answering the phone, endlessly chatting about people we will never see. It all matters hugely to her. But the crisis brings home to her the unhappiness she’s masking. And this is the oomph we will remember from tonight.

The snatch of Bowie works well; Hugh Ross adds quiet, pained dignity to proceedings as the unneeded husband David; and the fact that it runs straight through without interval is massively in its favour. Is it the right play to open the season? Possibly not. Would it fare better in the Minerva? Possibly yes. But the eventual interplay between Lia Williams and Joshua James is certainly compelling.

Tickets from Chichester Festival Theatre online at https://www.cft.org.uk/