THE VORTEX Rose Theatre, Kingston-on-Thames

The 24-year-old Noël Coward caused something of a furore when his play, in which he had written a whacking leading role for himself, opened in 1924. A neurotic young man returns from Paris, engaged to a girl he doesn’t love, to discover his shallow, selfish mother is having an affair with a chap no older than himself. He berates her in a hysterical manner, which will trigger memories of Hamlet’s scene with his mother and Mrs Alving’s scene with her son in Ibsen’s Ghosts. The Lord Chamberlain thought the characters were thoroughly unpleasant and wanted to ban the play because he felt “swirling about in a vortex of beastliness” gave a false impression of British society. Gerald du Maurier, the then leading member of the acting profession, was horrified. “The young generation,” he observed “are knocking at the door of the dustbin.” Stephen Unwin’s disappointing production, badly designed, badly costumed, and mainly miscast, has not got the measure of Coward’s brittle sophistication. The performances lack focus, energy and style. The audience laughed in all the wrong places on night I went.