I always thought Coward's The Vortex to be two acts of comic persiflage followed by a rerun of the closet scene from Hamlet. But Michael Grandage, opening his reign as the Donmar's artistic director, unifies the play by highlighting its real theme: the folly of slamming the door in the face of age. "Much wiser," as Coward wrote in his Diaries, "to be polite and gracious and ask him to lunch in advance."
In 1924 the play was seen as a sex-and-sensation shocker. After all, its heroine, Florence Lancaster, is an ageing butterfly who cavorts with a young lover under her husband's nose. Her son Nicky, returning from a debauched year in Paris, is a febrile neurotic with a severe coke habit. And in the no-holds-barred final act the Oedipally jealous son confronts his vain, self-deluding mother with the truth about themselves and the fact that they are jointly trapped in "a vortex of beastliness".
While artfully refashioning himself as a cosmopolitan hedonist, Coward was always something of a middle-class moralist. And Grandage grasps the point that the whole play is a finger-wagging warning about the danger of living a lie.
Right from the start there is something shrill and manic about Francesca Annis's unstoppable Flo: so much so that when reportedly praised by Nicky's fiancee for having the face of "an heroic little boy" she instinctively rushes to the mirror for confirmation. And when in the last act her best friend forces her to face up to her advancing years I was reminded, in Annis's naked desperation, of Tennessee Williams' Blanche Dubois at a similar moment of cruel truth telling.
But, inescapably, the main argument will centre on the casting of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Nicky. Even if in the opening exchanges he underplays the character's adverbial excess, he gets away from the cliched idea that Nicky's dope taking is a metaphor for his closeted sexuality. Ejiofor lets us see that Nicky poses far more of a threat to his mother if he is youthfully straight rather than flakily bi; and in a fine performance that transcends the artificial barriers of race Ejiofor makes us painfully aware that Nicky's tragedy is his lack of maternal love.
Deborah Findlay as a suspiciously enthusiastic truth teller, Indira Varma as Nicky's delectable if metallic fiancee and Bette Bourne as an acidulous socialite support with beautiful precision.
And Christopher Oram's art deco designs elegantly grace a production that makes us realise that under the gilded carapace of Coward the Master lay the moralising spirit of a prim Victorian miss.
· Until February 15. Box office: 020-7369 1732.
