Noël was faced with the need to raise capital in less than a week; not, this time, a small personal loan to get him through a bad month, but instead the comparatively vast sum of two hundred pounds. Ned Lathom, Coward’s first thought, had already been over-generous in the past and to ask him again for money would be unthinkable. Few others, though, were enthusiastic enough about the theatre in general or Noël in particular to back The Vortex to that extent. Luckily for Coward, he found one of them; not exactly a friend, more of an acquaintance, but a young Armenian novelist called Dikran Kouyoumdjian who had recently been in the same penniless situation until his success earlier in the year with a best-seller called The Green Hat and the altered name of Michael Arlen. Over lunch at the Ritz, without asking any questions or setting any terms for repayment or even wanting to read the play, Arlen wrote Noël a cheque for two hundred and fifty pounds and went on recounting the plot of his new short story. Rehearsals of The Vortex went ahead as planned, for about two more weeks. Then Kate Cutler, putting an abrupt end to the friendship with Noël that dated back to the days of I’ll Leave It To You, announced that the part of Florence (though written with her in mind) was not after all satisfactory and that, with the first night less than a week away, she would be leaving the company.
Her motives for walking out, and for bringing The Vortex to the verge of another ignominious halt, have never been entirely clear, and in retrospect from Miss Cutler’s point of view it must be considered one of the great mistakes of her career. On the other hand one suspects that what worried her at the time was not so much her own part, which after all she had agreed to play some weeks earlier and remained now virtually unchanged, but rather Noël’s which during rehearsal had changed considerably. This was particularly apparent in the last act, the confrontation between mother and son on which the rest of the play depended; during the second interval The Vortex undergoes a swift change from comedy to tragedy, and to make this viable Noël realized in rehearsal that his own part in Act Three would have to be greatly enlarged. Miss Cutler was not pleased at the prospect of sharing the dramatic highlights of the last act with the author, and perhaps for this reason above all others she left. Noël’s position must have been a tricky one; as actor and as author he stood to gain a great deal by the changes in the last act, but as actor and as author he also stood to lose the entire play by the departure of Miss Cutler. Nor was the quarrel made any easier by Noël’s belief that, as an author, he was motivated by the best literary intentions while Miss Cutler held that, as an actor, he was simply trying to get himself a better part. To have given in to her, and to have reverted to the last act as originally written, would have been the easy way out; Noël chose the difficult one and began looking for a middle-aged actress who could take on a difficult and possibly unrewarding part with under a week’s rehearsal.
Any actress even remotely suitable for the part was, understandably enough, unavailable at such short notice; it became within a few hours a search for someone available rather than someone suitable and on this basis Lilian Braithwaite was approached. It was, on the face of it, casting bizarre and possibly disastrous. Miss Braithwaite was a tall, dark grande dame of the theatre accustomed to presiding over gracious tea-party scenes in comedies at the Haymarket; Florence Lancaster was a small, fair, flamboyant neurotic. Unmoved by these considerations or indeed any others, Noël and Gladys Calthrop hastened round to Miss Braithwaite’s flat in Pelham Crescent the morning after Kate Cutler’s ultimatum, to read her The Vortex. She liked the play, and saw the challenge of the part; her career at this moment in time was not all that it might have been, and though she was about to accept a large salary for playing a small part in Orange Blossoms she had not actually signed the contract. She agreed, therefore, to take the risk of a fortnight in Hampstead with The Vortex provided only that Noël would return to Kate Cutler and give her one last chance to change her mind about giving up the role.
Noël, who had by this time decided that risk or not he would rather have Lilian than Kate Cutler for the part anyway, went back to Miss Cutler’s flat where he blithely allowed her to talk herself irrevocably out of one of the best opportunities of her career, noticing in himself only the very slightest twinges of guilt.
Macdermott, who had been away for the week-end and had therefore missed all this, returned to his theatre on the Monday morning to find Miss Braithwaite in full rehearsal having already learnt most of the part. He was not pleased, partly because he felt her to be suicidal casting and mainly because he had not been consulted in the first place. He threatened to abandon the production entirely, until reminded by Noël that as the costs were now being met by Michael Arlen’s cheque the production was no longer his to abandon. He was still nominally the director, but by this time the production was firmly in Noël’s hands which, one suspects, was precisely the way Coward had wanted it all along. Macdermott suffered one further defeat when he attempted to take programme credit for Gladys Calthrop’s Act Two setting, to which he had contributed one sole fireplace. Forced by Noël and Gladys to remove his name from this part of the programme, Macdermott also removed his fireplace from the set, leaving a nasty hole upstage on the first night.
The last week of rehearsal, in a November so icy that even driving up to Hampstead proved difficult, consisted exclusively of hard work and deep depression, though Miss Braithwaite proved a tower of strength while all collapsed around her; a further cast change had been forced when Helen Spencer developed diphtheria and had to be replaced at the last minute by Mollie Kerr as the young flapper. In the midst of all this theatrical hell the then Lord Chamberlain, Lord Cromer, decided that the play’s theme was far too unpleasant for him to grant it a licence; though whether it was Florence’s nymphomania, Nicky’s drug-addiction or the son’s passionate devotion to his mother that caused such alarm is not evident. But His Lordship was ultimately persuaded, by Noël, on the morning of the first night, that so far from being unpleasant The Vortex was in fact designed as a moral tract of the highest order, and on that understanding it was licensed for public performance. In his determination to get the play a licence. Coward had threatened to serialize the script in a national paper and let the public judge its moral suitability.
The day of the final dress rehearsal was endless and gloomy, enlivened only by the theatre cat excreting on stage centre during a run-through of the second act. That night the play was watched in absolute silence by two people: the journalist George Bishop and Miss Braithwaite’s daughter, the actress Joyce Carey:
‘It was shattering ... I’d never seen anything like it on the stage in my life, and the last act left one literally shaking with excitement – both my mother and Noël were fantastically good. I was never encouraged to give my opinions (at least not by my mother) but afterwards I went backstage and found them huddled round a stove like Russian emigrés looking terribly moody, so I had to say how marvellous I thought it was and how I was sure that it would be the most tremendous success. My mother and Noël, I remember, both looked thoroughly surprised but they did cheer up a bit after that.’
The first night, as Miss Carey had predicted, was nothing short of a triumph. Lilian’s performance was steady as a rock and Noël, who had spent the whole day on his hands and knees with Gladys and the stage manager finishing off the set, got away with a nerve-strung histrionic tour de force that in later weeks he was able to refine and discipline into a more subdued but perhaps no more effective reading of the part. Until then, by virtue of being his own director, he had not found time to do much about his acting. But the tension of his performance on the opening night at the Everyman was increased by the fact that in sweeping a collection of bottles from a dressing-table in the last act he managed to cut his wrist quite badly, which then bled effectively throughout his curtain speech. Blood, like children and dogs, could usually be relied on as an applause-raiser though on this occasion the play would unquestionably have survived without it.
Beyond doubt The Vortex came as a seve
re shock to its fashionable first-night house (‘among the audience in this intriguing and barnlike little theatre were Lady Curzon, looking lovelier than ever, Michael Arlen, Lady Louis Mountbatten with Captain Mackintosh and Captain Dawson, Mr Eddie Marsh, Lady Carisbrooke, the Cochrans, Lord Lathom and all the regular theatrical enthusiasts of le beau monde’), precisely the kind of audience who presumably spent their weekends at country house-parties like that established in the first act. They had made the perilous journey to Hampstead, and a number of columns the following morning carried sharp footnotes describing the dangers of London Transport, on the strength of Noël’s reputation as a writer of light comedy. But here, instead of another comedy, was a play of his about drug-addiction at a time when alcoholism was scarcely mentioned on the stage; it came as considerably more of a surprise to that audience than the curses of Jimmy Porter before another one on the theatrical outskirts of London almost thirty years later.
Now, in cold print, Nicky’s outburst against his mother and the depraved world around her has echoes of the hilarity of Bea Lillie’s ‘Maud, You’re Rotten to the Core’; but on the stage in 1924, its message, without even a backward glance at Pinero, came over as original and very startling indeed. ‘If I had written that,’ said Michael Arlen, going back-stage after the first night, ‘I should have been so very proud.’
In fact The Vortex is a curious and sometimes uneasy mixture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; its form and its content are not always in perfect harmony. At the time of its first production, critics recognized a kind of fashionable depravity in Nicky’s drug-taking and in the social gossip about the private lives of the week-end house party set, to which it was widely believed that Noël already belonged. But it was left to St John Ervine alone among the original reviewers to realize that The Vortex is a very moral play, dedicated to the old-fashioned virtues of hard work and clean living, by which most of the characters are judged and found wanting. Here as in so many later plays from Post Mortem to Suite in Three Keys Coward is concerned with standards – with what is done and what is not done in the best moral code of values; one is made constantly aware of the dignities of life, and of how these are being abused. ‘It doesn’t matter about death,’ Nicky tells his mother at the end of Act Three, ‘but it matters terribly about life’ – and, by implication, about the way we choose to live it.
But with the melodrama of this final confrontation still to come, the first act of The Vortex is misleading to say the least; it gives the impression that here is a precious, fairly innocuous comedy not far removed in style or content from the light, well-made pattern of The Young Idea. The Vortex, however, takes a turn for the better at roughly the same moment that its leading character takes a turn for the worse, and from then on reviewers looking for a point of reference were forced to turn to Maugham’s savage Our Betters, seen in London a year before, rather than to the earlier and flimsier work of Coward himself.
In fact, there was now a feeling (shared by Lilian and Noël himself as well as most critics) that the ‘wunderkind’ had come up with something solid for the first time, a play that would ensure him success as a dramatist more lasting than the brittle and rather precarious social triumphs of the earlier comedies.
Enthusiastic reviews and a public titillated by the murmur of something faintly immoral assured for The Vortex a rapid transfer to the West End. Eight managers went to Hampstead to bid for it, reviving as they did so the old argument for a try-out theatre like the Everyman (which had also staged Outward Bound for the first time) to be given some kind of financial security as a form of insurance for playwrights and managers alike. In the event, The Vortex left Hampstead at the beginning of December after only twelve performances; a few days later, under the management of Limpus and Kenyon which had made Noël the most attractive offer, it opened at the Royalty Theatre to run there and subsequently at the Comedy and Little Theatres for a total of 224 West End performances. Superficially the resemblance between Noël and Nicky Lancaster was too great for Noël ever to escape the ‘well-groomed, witty and decadent’ label of the neurotic misfit that he had created for his play. But to have argued with all the publicity would have been ludicrous. If that was the picture of him Fleet Street wanted to purvey, then Noël was only too happy to go along with it; the results at the box-office were tangible, and he was astute enough to realize that the truth about him might prove a great deal less interesting to the public at large. At a time when the advertising industry was in its infancy and television had yet to be developed, his was an early example of the image becoming the reality.
On Coward’s home life the effect of The Vortex was electric:
‘With this success came many pleasurable trappings. A car. New suits. Silk shirts. An extravagant amount of pyjamas and dressing-gowns, and a still more extravagant amount of publicity. I was photographed, and interviewed, and photographed again. In the street. In the park. In my dressing-room. At my piano. With my dear old mother, without my dear old mother – and, on one occasion, sitting up in an over-elaborate bed looking like a heavily doped Chinese Illusionist. This last photograph, I believe, did me a good deal of harm. People glancing at it concluded at once, and with a certain justification, that I was undoubtedly a weedy sensualist in the last stages of physical and moral degeneration, and that they had better hurry off to see me in my play before my inevitable demise placed that faintly macabre pleasure beyond their reach. This attitude, while temporarily very good for business, became irritating after a time, and for many years I was seldom mentioned in the Press without allusions to “cocktails”, “post-war hysteria” and “decadence”.’
The first night of The Vortex at the Royalty was December 16th 1924, Noël’s twenty-fifth birthday; at the end Noël made a restrained, tactful curtain speech hoping that the West End would enjoy the play as much as had audiences up at the Everyman. They did, and the critics were again enthusiastic in the main, though Basil Macdonald Hastings for the Daily Express felt that it was a ‘dustbin of a play’; James Agate, in the Sunday Times, after a good deal of praise ended rather sharply: ‘The third act is too long, there is too much piano playing in the second, and ladies do not exhale cigarette smoke through the nose.’ Still, the majority view was that of Ivor Brown who wrote that ‘as actor and as author’, Coward ‘drives at reality’. Noël was again acclaimed, by critics though not necessarily the gentlemen themselves, as the new Sacha Guitry and/or Somerset Maugham.
The play also included for the first time, in the role of Helen, a worldly-wise friend to Florence, the character who reappears in different guises in most of Coward’s post-Vortex plays as a kind of chorus; sometimes it is a man, and if so usually an author, sometimes a woman, but in either case planted there to watch the action from the sidelines and to utter the thoughts that come closest to the playwright’s own detached and often cynical view of whatever the situation happens to be.
With the success of The Vortex, which was published soon after its West End opening and dedicated ‘to Gladys Calthrop with a good deal of gratitude’, Noël was everywhere in demand; not least by the Evening News, a paper mentioned by one of the characters in the play and which soon afterwards commissioned Noël to write for them on ‘The Young Playwright’s Problem’. Reading his article now it is something of a shock to find that Coward wrote it in much the same terms as those of his critics who, thirty years later, were to blame him vitriolically for perpetrating drawing-room comedies at the expense of progress towards realism in the theatre:
‘Looking at the various difficulties that confront the modern dramatist, perhaps the most disheartening is the desire of the British public to be amused and not enlightened. The problem arises: is the theatre to be a medium of expression setting forth various aspects of reality, or merely a place of relaxation where weary business men and women can witness a pleasing spectacle bearing no relation whatever to the hard facts of existence, and demanding no effort of concentration?
‘Those men are the lasti
ng hope of the theatre who, placing the public intelligence at its highest, express accordingly their genuine convictions, and present the very real problems of life in dramatic surroundings.’
One man who disagreed violently with Noël’s desire at that time to portray ‘reality’ on the stage was Sir Gerald du Maurier, who was already alarmed by new trends in the theatre and saw in Noël’s generation a challenge to his own supremacy. Soon after the opening of The Vortex, he published a scathing attack on contemporary stage morals:
‘The public are asking for filth ... the younger generation are knocking at the door of the dustbin ... if life is worse than the stage, should the stage hold the mirror up to such distorted nature? If so, where shall we be – without reticence or reverence?’
Much later in his life it is clear that Noël would have agreed with Sir Gerald wholeheartedly – indeed, he was to write a series of articles for the Sunday Times along markedly similar lines in 1961. But in 1925 Coward, together with Arnold Bennett and Edward Knoblock, leapt to the defence of the ‘new drama’. Noël’s reply to Sir Gerald was published by the Daily Express:
‘Sir Gerald du Maurier, having – if he will forgive me saying so – enthusiastically showered the English stage with second-rate drama for many years, now rises up with incredible violence and has a nice slap all round at the earnest and perspiring young dramatists.
‘This is awful; it is also a little unwise. Art demands reverence much more than life does – and Sir Gerald’s reverence so far seems to have been entirely devoted to the box-office.
A Talent to Amuse: A Life of Noel Coward Page 12
