On the 25th of November 1924 an audience at the Everyman Theatre Hampstead, London, witnessed the first performance of a play that was to shock and scandalise London society. It was also to revolutionise the theatre of the time and become a Classic of British Drama.

The play was “The Vortex” and the playwright was Noel Coward, astonishingly just twenty four years old at the time. The play was a phenomenal success and launched Coward’s career as the most successful British playwright of the next four decades.

No one had dared to show London high-society of the time in its true light before; spoilt, frivolous but, above all, rotten and decadent. Coward’s play held-up the ‘mirror’ to London society and society didn’t like what it saw, while the rest of the world looked on in shock!

The play, written and set in 1920s London, revolves around the word of socialite Florence Lancaster and her circle of friends and family. A great beauty who has led a life of considerable promiscuity with much younger admirers, Florence now refuses to accept the reality of age and is pursuing her latest conquest Tom, a handsome but dull, young Guards officer.

It is when Florence’s son, Nicky, returns home from life in Paris to introduce his fiancee, Bunty, to his mother, that the play turns from an amusing drawing-room comedy into something far more serious.

Nicky is horrified to find that, not only is his mother notorious in London society for her promiscuity but that her latest lover, Tom, is of his own age. Worse still, he learns that Tom was previously engaged to Bunty.

Nicky, an aspiring pianist – and a role Coward created for himself – has his own demons though and, in a series of brilliantly written scenes, is forced to admit weaknesses in his own lifestyle.

The climax of the play is the famous, final scene set in Florence’s bedroom and one that owes a debt to Hamlet’s anguished “closet scene” with Gertrude.

Son confronts mother over her appalling lifestyle but mother retaliates against son over his own. They fight, they scream, they cry, they abuse each other until, with both exhausted, the play reaches its climax; It is one of the great scenes in British drama.

In fact the whole play unravels a network of hidden, past and forbidden relationships that the paying public of the time would have found shocking to watch.

“The Vortex” is above all else, though, a play about sexual vanity and emotional dependency. As such, its theme is as relevant to life today as it was in the 1920s.

At times full of witty, satirical, cutting humour and at others a cruel expose of a corrupt high society, “The Vortex” has long been acclaimed as one of Coward’s best plays and certainly one of his most perceptive.

The play and its central character of Florence, has also attracted some of the world’s great actresses.

Coward himself wrote, directed and starred in the play that would run for a year in London and would ensure he would never be poor again.

It signalled the start of a prolific writing career in which he produced over 40 plays and musicals, around 10 films and TV scripts, 15 musical revues and cabarets, not to mention his books of short stories and memoirs. All this is staggering considering Noel also directed, acted and sang in the majority of the work he produced.