The Vortex in 1924, the same year he wrote Hay Fever. I just watched The Vortex on YouTube with Margaret Leighton —who is marvelously competent, but not amazing; she’s no Gertie Lawrence -- but then again her character Florence is no Amanda Prynne. I am setting myself the task of watching old BBC productions of Noel Coward plays on YouTube. I did my doctoral thesis on Coward. No one cares, of course. I worked on that damn thing for five years with a publisher -- Wilfred Laurier University Press -- and was unceremoniously dumped by them for no apparent reason. Obviously they detested me and/or my book. I have no problem trashing them as they were beastly to me (to use a Noel Coward word). I worked with some woman endlessly, disemboweling my thesis for her, I did everything but have it drawn and quartered by horses at her bidding, I just wanted that thing published. Her most consistent criticism was that I loved Coward too much. This was not ‘scholarly.’ Well, I spent every chapter writing critically, but sometimes at the end of each I would let myself go and start rattling on about how brilliant he was. No, she wouldn’t have it. Well, anyway, the central concept of my thesis was ‘the queer feminine’ a term borrowed from one of my advisors Michael Cobb. I owe him that. I owe Alexander Leggatt ‘Pinter.’ I’ll never forget walking into his office for the usual scholarly advice and having him say — much like the older businessman to Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate: ‘plastics’ -- “I have one word for you — Pinter.” He was right and I devoted a whole chapter to Coward and Pinter. Anyway, I’m not saying my thesis was perfect -- and I went on to apply the concept of the queer feminine to Shakespeare, which I’ve been doing for roughly the last 15 years. Get that bee out of your bonnet -- that doesn’t mean Shakespeare was gay—but it does mean I’m obsessed with a certain style of writing —over-figured, lush rhetoric -- so weighty with wordplay that it sometimes gets on your nerves. Speaking of nerves, 'nerves' are the central issue in The Vortex. Nicky Lanacaster (what a name for a grown man!) has just come home from the war, and he is quite 'nervy.' In the BBC version Richard Warwick plays Nicky. He is just lovely in every way (Franco Zeffirelli stuffed him into a codpiece for Romeo and Juliet -- very wise). But one must imagine Noel Coward in the role. He wrote it for himself (he was only 24 at the time) so he could become a big star -- and he did. The play was a ‘success du scandal’ which is undoubtedly what Coward intended, that is, to be talked about. It’s not a particularly good play, in fact it’s pretty much as good as its models — the later plays of Somerset Maugham, and the Oscar Wilde melodramas. The scandal is that the young nervy Nicky is a coke addict, and that his mother has traumatized him by falling in love with men his age and ignoring him. But what’s really going on in the play is incest, it’s one of those things that everyone knows about a play like this -- but no one ever talks about. It’s all very 'Gertrude and Hamlet.' Leighton is still gorgeous at 47; so when she is crying in bed, and he climbs in with her and hugs her, it is deliciously inappropriate. I can identify because I was in love with my mother — but I didn’t want to kill my father, I just wanted to kill her (that’s what separates homosexuals from heterosexuals, psychologically — see Deleuze and Guarrari). In the final act Leighton mainly cries, which she does very well, but I bet the original Florence (Lilian Breaithwaite) — did not cry all the time. I’m sure the young Coward was as brittle as a shaft of hay in the part. Speaking of which, Coward wrote Hay Fever and The Vortex at the same time hoping one of them would be a hit; he wasn’t sure which one it wuld be. The Vortex won, but interestingly — and this is part of Coward’s genius — he didn’t follow it up with other similar plays (or he did, once or twice, but failed miserably). He knew which side his bread was buttered on: wit. You can see a little bit of Coward the homosexual -- and also the influence of Oscar Wilde -- in Pawnie, a gay character in The Vortex who appears early on, and then disappears (as all gay characters did before AIDS, AIDS became a dramaturgical device that made it more convenient to excise them). Pawnie is quite funny, and the actor playing him resembles Coward in visage and tone. Pawnie enters and immediately comments on the decor — placing him as the Oscar Wilde simulacrum: “Oh God, look at this lampshade!” Coward detests Pawnie, just as he detested his own sexuality (he told Gertrude Lawrence that -- though he was attracted to boys -- he would never ‘do those awful things they do with each other.’ He never 'came out,' formally, saying near the end, something like -- “I’d rather not, after all, there is some nice old lady in Newmarket-On-Thyme who does not yet know"). So immediately after the lamp comment, Coward exposes Wilde (and Pawnie) as gay-as-the-day, when Pawnie spies a photo and asks: “Who’s this ahh…boy?” Pawnie's obsessions are aesthetics and the male form; he is a copy of the villainous leading character in The Green Bay Tree (a homophobic melodrama — one of the first ever gay plays — produced in London and on Broadway in 1931-- Lawrence Olivier was in it -- it was a play that Coward had some hand in producing). I don’t blame Coward — though he went on to write a parody of Wildean closet cases in the song 'We All Wear A Green Carnation' (in Cavalcade), and he would continue to lampoon gay characters, and psychiatry, all the things that threatened him. He did write one gay play -- which I think I will watch on BBC -- called Song at Twilight, and it’s good in the way The Vortex is good, which means not good enough. It’s intended as a critique of Somerset Maugham. Maugham, when very old, submitted to being injected with bull’s testicles — fashionable at the time -- and didn’t look a day over sixty when he was 90. It was disconcerting to this friends, as he had lost his mind, but not his face. More to come….
