Debut night for Michael Grandage

Bette Bourne, who is impure, comic bliss as Pauncefort Quentin, a Wildean old queen sporting dyed hair and the only player with a Twenties diction or authentic Coward style, observes Florence's social fluttering with heartfelt malice. "Not wasting your valuable time on sincerity ?"he drawls. As Florence, a woman who ought to know better but cannot resist being worse, an affective Francesca Annis persuasively presents her as an attractive narcissist, all giggles and self-absorbed immaturity: she behaves as if she's found the key to put time on hold, in an age before facelifts helped you out. Her husband looms small in her life.

Drugs are the secret bugbear of Florence's irritable, depressed son Nicky, who returns from Paris with a fiancèe called Bunty, a severe addiction to coke and resentment that his mother has eyes only for herself and her lover. In 1924, when a censor still controlled the theatre and upper-class characters were supposed to set a moral example, Florence and Nicky were reckoned sensational and subversive. Today such people are minor celebrities, chattering proudly about their latest beaux and their dope cures in the gossip columns. Grandage, as if wrongly believing that The Vortex was accordingly old hat and needed to make new waves, has cast that highly promising black-African actor Chiwetel Ejiofor as Nicky.

THE idea was surely to see whether Ejiofor could contribute fresh insights to Coward's play, with its vision of class-conscious England. Sadly it does not work. Ejiofor may sport an effete cravat but there seems something sturdy, solid and strenuously masculine about him, where Nicky is neurotic, petulant and more gay than straight. What's more, Ejiofor doesn't even sound consistently middle-class. It would have been better if he had played phlegmatic Tom who ends up with Indira Varma's Bunty in a

scene which is radiant with social unease and Florence's fury. And Mark Umbers, who makes Tom strangely vulnerable, delicate and ill-at-ease, could suitably have swapped roles with Ejiofor.

Grandage's production also succumbs to shrill but hollow histrionics, though Deborah Findlay as Florence's best friend stays calm except when there's mention of cocaine. In the Hamlet-like bedroom scene, with Nicky's anguished sense of his life in ruins and Florence's pathetic awareness that her sexy selfdevotion has brought her no lasting life-rewards, both actors blast us with sound and fury. But Coward's devastating finale works best if played low-key with conscience's still, small voice revealing the truth.

The Vortex