The Malibu Times

The Vortex: British High Society Meets the Malibu Stage

by Hank Pollard

Noël Coward’s drama, The Vortex, which opened at the Malibu Playhouse last Friday evening, differs markedly from his signature lighter works, Private Lives and Blithe Spirit. He said of himself that he had “a talent to amuse,” but this play shows his darker, deeper side. While his trademark barbed wit is evident, it is intertwined with existential issues: the dread of aging, drug abuse, adultery, nymphomania, homosexuality and Oedipal tension.

In 1924, when the play premiered in London, although playgoers were unaccustomed to such themes, it was a succès de scandale of the Jazz Age. The 90 years that have elapsed have not dulled its impact and the Playhouse’s production does it full justice. Although the setting has been moved from the mid-1920s to 1965, the demographic remains customary Coward — British high society. As was often the case, he wrote the male lead role of Nicky Lancaster for himself.

Nicky is the young, effete son of Florence Lancaster, a famous actress unhappily aging and desperately resisting the advances of time. Nicky’s struggle to find in Florence the mother figure she has denied him and her inability to satisfy him is the focus of the play.

The play begins in traditional Noël Coward fashion, replete with lively droll banter, cocktails, cigarettes and dancing to popular tunes. We meet Florence’s’ two friends, Helen (Victoria Hoffman), witty, warm-hearted and brutally honest, and Pawnie (Cameron Mitchell, Jr.), described by Coward as “an elderly maiden gentleman.” Their verbal jousting is a delightful contest of waspishness. Florence’s paramour, Tom (Daniel Jimenez), is portrayed with apt immaturity.

Nicky’s fiancée, Bunty (Skye LaFontaine), has a lovely exterior that barely masks her callousness. Florence’s cuckolded husband, David (Will Carney), moves about aimlessly and cluelessly.

Nicky returns from a sojourn in Paris with his newly acquired fiancée — and a drug habit — trying to connect with Florence. In a poignant scene, they dance to the Gershwin standard, “Someone to Watch Over Me,” while singing along. But Florence has been waging her battle to hold back the clock through serial adultery with young lovers, and this revolts Nicky. Other complications occur and he is brought to the brink of hysteria and cries out, “We swirl about in a vortex of beastliness.” His pent-up passion finally bursts in Florence’s bedroom in a scene eerily reminiscent of the Hamlet/Gertrude confrontation. He shouts, “You’ve given me nothing all my life … You never love anyone. You only want them loving you.” She counters with, “I’m still young inside. I’m still beautiful. Why shouldn’t I live my life as I choose?” The curtain falls with Nicky cradled in his mother’s arms, weeping.

Shannon Holt gives a bravura performance as Florence. She reaches a level of histrionics that appropriately captures the terror of the aging actress and her neediness for adulation. It is a juicy role and Holt squeezes all there is out of it. Nicky, in the Noël Coward role, is superbly acted by Craig Robert Young. He depicts vividly the young man’s confused and unrequited longing for a maternal bond.

The play is ably directed by Gene Franklin Smith, the Playhouse’s artistic director. While the time of the play has been changed, the locale is still England, thus requiring the actors (other than Young, who is British) to affect accents. They do this credibly, although a slower pacing of the sequences of rapid repartee might improve cognition for the American ear. Staging a play on the Playhouse’s curtain-less stage was a challenge when the action moves from a London living room, to a country house and then to Florence’s bedroom. This feat is carried off faultlessly with all three sets on stage for which Erin Walley and Derrick McDaniel — the scenic and lighting designers — deserve plaudits.

Malibu Surfside News

The Vortex Showcases 1960s Counterculture

by Suzanne Guldimann

In 1924, Noel Coward shocked audiences with his controversial and highly successful play The Vortex. Addiction, narcissism, nymphomania and homosexuality are unlikely to shock 21st century theatergoers in the same way they affected Coward’s first audience, but what may surprise them is how relevant this Jazz Age play remains. There have been several recent revivals of this early Coward play. The most recent just opened at the Malibu Playhouse.

Director Gene Franklin Smith opted to move the setting from the 1920s to the 1960s.

“Why did I stage ‘The Vortex’ in 1965? Blame it on Keith Richards,” Smith wrote in the production’s program notes. He explained that, while reading Richards’ autobiography, he found a parallel between the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and the changes wrought by Coward’s generation in post-WW I Britain.

This is not one of Coward’s “light” plays. Whether it’s set in the ’20s or the ’60s, beneath Coward’s celebrated urbane wit The Vortex is brutal. In the first act, the cutting remarks are so sharp that it takes the unfortunate recipients a moment before the pain is felt. By the third and final act the veneer of civility is stripped away entirely, leaving raw emotion.

At the center of the metaphorical vortex are Florence Lancaster, played by Shannon Holt, and her son Nicky, Craig Robert Young. Florence is an aging socialite who attempts to cling to youth and beauty by a series of extramarital affairs with younger men.

The sexually ambiguous Nicky, the role Coward wrote for himself, “doesn’t have the knack for [happiness].” He’s a talented musician who is not so much struggling with drug addiction as embracing it. He’s engaged to the beautiful but non-committal Bunty (Skye Fontaine) but he doesn’t love her. It rapidly become apparent that the only person he loves is his mother, and his mother loves only herself.

Holt delivers a powerful performance, ranging from brittle sophistication to shrill hysteria to naked fear. When we are introduced to Florence, she sparkles and shimmers in a rhinestone-encrusted gown, the center of attention. By the end of the third act she appears suddenly gaunt and haggard.

Young is also impressive, taking Nicky on the downward spiral from Bright Young Thing to a final scene imbued with a truly frightening and obsessive madness.

Victoria Hoffman is outstanding in the role of Helen, the family friend who sees clearly and attempts unsuccessfully to guide mother and son away from disaster.

Smith has trimmed several characters and streamlined the play. Costume designer Brian Primeaux has dressed the three women in shimmering gowns that aptly reflect each character’s persona. The set, designed by Erin Walley, recreates the feel of the ’60s with a palette of browns, oranges and turquoise, and details that include an LP of music by Henry Mancini from Peter Gunn, and an Andy Warhol-style pop-art portrait of actress Sharon Holt in character as Florence Lancaster.

Stage Raw

by Terry Morgan

“We swirl around in a vortex of beastiliness,” wrote Noel Coward in his 1924 drama The Vortex. True enough. While his story of selfish socialites being forced to acknowledge the effects of their actions hasn’t retained its scandalous reputation, the enjoyable new production at Malibu Playhouse demonstrates that it still has emotional resonance.

Florence Lancaster (Shannon Holt) refuses to go into that good night, holding on to her youth and beauty with single-minded tenacity. Tom (Daniel Jimenez) is the latest in a long series of Florence’s lovers, although she’s still married to long-suffering David (Will Carney). Her friend Pawnie (Cameron Mitchell Jr.) indulges Florence, though Florence’s best friend Helen (Victoria Hoffman) tries to talk sense to her. When her adult son Nicky (Craig Robert Young) returns home with a coke addition and fiancee Bunty (Skye LaFontaine), however, the facade of her life begins to implode.

Holt’s Florence is bright and vivacious, conveying both Coward’s inherent theatricality and the angry, frightened person behind the glittering front. Hoffman’s sympathetic, clear-eyed Helen complements LaFontaine’s cool, realistic Bunty. Jimenez, Carney and Mitchell capably round out the strong cast.

Director Gene Franklin Smith keeps the pace sprightly, which serves the show well. Brian Primeaux’s costumes are impressive, from a selection of shimmering dresses to a loud velvet suit.

Stage Scene LA

by Steven Stanley

Recommended A pair of sensational lead performances and a fabulous 1960s design are the best reasons to catch this rare revival of Noël Coward’s 1924 hit.

A 25-year-old Noël himself starred in The Vortex’s London premiere just a year before Hay Fever made him a play-writing superstar (to be followed in 1930 by Private Lives and in 1941 by Blithe Spirit), and for its first two-thirds, we have every reason to expect Sir Noël’s first great commercial success to be the non-stop comedy bonbon his later smashes proved.

The Vortex introduces us to Nicky Lancaster (Craig Robert Young), a talented 20something Londoner with a mother who could have easily given Auntie Mame Dennis a lesson in fabulousness. Not only is Florence Lancaster (Shannon Holt) the grooviest, most glamorous mom in all of London, she’s got a boy toy younger than her son (Daniel Jimenez as Tom Veryan), a loyal sidekick more than willing to bask in her best friend’s glow (Victoria Hoffman as Helen Saville), a flamingly gay chum (Cameron Mitchell Jr. as Pauncefort “Pauney” Quentin), and a fuddy-duddy of a husband (Will Carney as David Lancaster) apparently clueless to his wife’s infidelities.

As for Nicky, well what young man-about-London wouldn’t wish for a fiancée as lovely and well-heeled as Bunty Mainwaring (Skye LaFontaine), though truth be told, Nicky doesn’t seem all that turned on by the fair young Bunty nor all that enthusiastic about tying the wedding noose. (Anyone familiar with Coward’s life and loves can guess why.)

Add to this the fact that Florence’s Tom and Nicky’s Bunty used to be an item (and still have the hots for each other) and you’ve got a recipe for a love quadrangle the likes of which Coward later turned into Private Lives.

The bons mots fly fast and furious and in true Cowardian fashion all the way up to intermission, and the Malibu Playhouse production’s time travel to the Swinging Sixties works quite marvelously, allowing scenic designer Erin Walley, costume designer Brian Primeaux, and hair and makeup designers Christina Culinski and Dale Johnson to transport us back to the era of miniskirts, teased hair, sleeveless shifts, Nehru jackets, and paisley prints.

Both Holt and Young give powerhouse performances under Smith’s generally assured directorial hand. The divine Holt makes every role she plays deliciously, indelibly her own, and her Florence is no exception, a bouffant blonde mess of woman holding on to her fading youth and beauty by a slender thread.

Native Brit Young could easily step into the shoes of just about every Coward romantic lead, but he is especially fine as Nicky, and never more so than in the Vortex’s devastating gut punch of a finale, played to the hilt by the production’s two stars.

FVM Global Magazine

One of the Best Plays in Los Angeles

by Faith Boutin

The Malibu Playhouse’s reimagined production of Noel Coward’s 1924 play The Vortex is a smashing success, brilliantly conceived, acted, staged, and directed. It is a passionate adaptation of the then scandalous play, with the bon mots flying as fast as the facades of the characters disintegrate. The production engulfs the audience in the vortex of each character’s life, alternately lifting theatergoers to the heights of delight and dropping them to the depths of despair.

Artistic director Gene Franklin Smith has reset the play in 1965 London, the start of the Hippie Revolution, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, but the themes are relevant for any time period. A promising young pianist who has been living a jaded life in Paris returns to London with his elegant fiancée whom he does not love to seek the approbation and love he will never receive from his aging, vainglorious, has-been actress-socialite mother, who has been carrying on with younger men. The flippant dialogue, which ensues between all the characters, masks the inner unraveling of each staged persona. As unresolved issues reach a head, mother and son are each both foiled and humiliated in their own doomed relationships, while their relationship to each other proves just as hopeless as the son desperately seeks the love of a mother incapable of anything other than self-love.

The homosexuality of the son is only hinted at in the play, as was the case with Coward, who never revealed in public his inclinations. With the rights of gays so much in the news today, one must realize that even though the play has been reset to 1965, when youth began to challenge the established order and dictums, homosexuality was still illegal in Britain at that time.

The Vortex was meant to serve as a vehicle for Coward’s own acting aspirations and its original production involved as much drama and turmoil as the play itself. Coward was forced to find his own financing for the play at the last minute and when he re-wrote the ending he subsequently lost his leading lady, just one week before the play was to open — if he could get it by the censor. Coward finessed his way through all this tumult and the play established his reputation. For all this effort, he originally earned the stupendous sum of 5 pounds per week, which was probably more than his understudy for the role did, John Gielgud.

The show revolves around Nicky Lancaster and his mother Florence, played with both radiance and intensity by Craig Robert Young and Shannon Holt. The privileged Nicky, whoThe Vortex is attempting to establish himself as a pianist of note while coping with his dubious sexuality and growing drug habit, has an unhealthy dependence on his mother, a once famous actress enraptured with herself and seeking only self-validation; she is having an affair with Tom (Daniel Jimenez), a younger man, while living under the same roof as her husband, who is seemingly oblivious, and reveling in the uncritical dotage of her friends.

Nicky, who has been leading a debauched life in Paris, brings home his intended Bunty (Skye LaFontaine), fruitlessly seeking his mother’s approval of her. Of course, a three-sided conflict, sparkling with vituperative Cowardisms, develops, and then the coup de grace is delivered to mother and son: Bunty and Tom, who were once attached, reattach and run off together. Mother and son “embrace” in the final act, but hardly find solace, not unexpected in a Cowardian world.

These two characters, Nicky and Florence Lancaster, and the play itself, are among Coward’s greatest creations. Although he is best remembered for Private Lives and Blithe Spirit, Noel Coward was certainly on point in The Vortex, subtly attacking with both wit and pathos the vapid upper class while exploring both on the surface and below the surface such issues as human sexuality, vanity, aging, infidelity, and Oedipal complexes.

The character of Nicky Lancaster is supposedly loosely based on Coward himself. Craig Robert Young plays that role to the hilt. He comments: “Coward’s words are just so delicious! You really need to understand that back then he wrote in code.”

However, Coward’s sardonic attacks on the privileged class and his sexual allusions could hardly be overlooked by the cognoscenti.

Young also offers his plaudits to his co-players and director: “I’m so fortunate to be working with this cast, whom I learn from everyday, and under the guidance of such a brilliant director as Gene Franklin Smith, whose vision and passion shine through with such finesse.”

Cameron Mitchell, Jr., Victoria Hoffman, and Will Carney are all able supporting players in this acerbic, thought-provoking drama.

The Anglo Files

A Beautiful Swirling Vortex of Beastliness

by Catherine Siggins

What do Keith Richards & Noel Coward have in common? No, it’s not the allusion to drugs, or that they’re both singer/ songwriters. For director Gene Franklin Smith, Keith’s observations, in his autobiography Life, of the changing societal landscape in Britain in the mid-60’s, mirrored Coward’s England of the 1920’s, when the lines separating the classes were swept away post-war by youth & popular culture.

Smith has edited the text, removing Preston, Clara Hibbert and Bruce Fairlight, focusing more directly on the main protagonists. The play opens in keeping with this rebellious nature, with the cast looking as though they are on the cover of a Bert Kaempfert album, dancing. Greg Chun’s sound design perfectly evokes the new wildness of this time.

In a kitsch London apartment, groovily designed by Erin Walley, newly engaged Nicky Lancaster, after a debauched year in Paris, has returned to England to gain approval for his future bride from his celebrated mother, a faded stage actress & learns she is being squired by a man his own age, who is too well acquainted with his fiancée for comfort. During the ensuing weekend party, at the Lancaster’s stylish Danish Modern country home, both Nicky & Florence are dumped, creating a crisis that exposes Nicky’s addiction inspired by the neglect & abusive nature of their family history.

With the battle cry, “it’s never to early for a cocktail”, Shannon Holt gives a stunning performance, playing Florence with relish. As dazzling as the costume she wears, with a kaleidoscope of colors & tones she creates a multi-facetted woman. We also see the flaws at the heart of this jewel, the isolation, desperate need for validation and denial.

Victoria Hoffman is exceptional as a witty, genuine, insightful Helen, as she tries but ultimately knows she can only fail to help her much-loved friends. Skye LaFontaine, delightful as uncomplicated It-girl, Bunty Mainwaring, with Daniel Jimenez, recalling a young Prince Philip, as strappingly regimental Tom Veryan, are perfect foils to Nicky and Florence. Will Carney gives a touching performance as Nicky’s defeated & withdrawn father, David Lancaster. And it is left to Cameron Mitchell Jr., as Pawnie, to supply the requisite flamboyance and facetiousness of Coward’s funniest characters, which he does with élan. Pawnie’s struggle over the chocolates was sublime.

As Nicky Lancaster, Craig Robert Young gives a bravura performance. He shifts beautifully between the funny, expressive, an outwardly confident young man to the little boy, who needs care. Utterly believable & heartbreaking, he shows Nicky’s struggle, disappointment, hope, yearning. With a real sense of desperation & impending violence, he had me on the edge of my seat.

The whole cast are superb and have succeeded in making these roles very much their own. If the applause at the end came rather late, as the cast returned to the stage, it was because we were all recovering our composure. The cast is helped by fabulous costumes, hair and make-up by Brian Primeaux, Christina Culinski & Dale Johnson.

When I lived in London, I made the pilgrimage to Stratford to see great theatre. I can assure you a trip to Malibu Playhouse, though minus the swans, is easier, way warmer, has ocean views, shrimp shacks en route and is just as enriching for your artistic soul.

This production stays with you long after you leave the theatre. In fact, it’s hard to describe this production without sounding like one of Coward’s characters, speaking superlatives.

Thespian Thoughts - The Vortex: Compelling, Powerful, Explosive

by Sandro Monetti

Playwright Noel Coward was more than just witty one liners, eccentric songs and elegant party scenes – as this fine production of one of his infrequently performed plays proves. Not since Hamlet first explored his issues with his mother has there been a more compelling family feud played out on stage.

The storyline sees flamboyant Nicky Lancaster introducing his fiancée to his glamorous socialite mother only for the two women to take an instant dislike to each other. Nicky is masking some inner torment which later bursts out when he is horrified to learn that his mother, Florence, has been having extra marital affairs with much younger men.

In the flashy role of Nicky, Craig Robert Young enters the stage with the explosive power of a hand grenade but then slows it down with some equally effective nuanced work as his character’s pain, addiction and other secrets emerge.

Shannon Holt is simply superb as Florence, a woman holding onto her youth as desperately as a drowning person clinging to a lifebelt.

These two dominate the action and attention so much that they overwhelm the other five characters in the play, and the rest largely drift into the background. But director Gene Franklin Smith does a good job keeping the focus on the most powerful part of the story and makes a clever choice updating Coward’s s original 1920’s setting to the swinging Sixties. But such is the timeless nature of the situations and characters, it could just as easily have been set today.