Reading Noel Coward's plays encourages the belief that there is a point where Literature and Show Business meet. While it is difficult to know exactly what happens there, these four volumes of his plays [Coward Plays], which take us up to 1941, certainly suggest that it may have provided Coward with the criteria as well as the conditions within which he conceived his work. (p. 46)
Coward's earlier plays prick at the pomposity principles of English life. Modernity, in behaviour, codes of conduct, fashions, and in its encouragement of irresponsibility and self-deception, intrigued him. "One gets carried away by glamour, and personality, and magnetism—they're beastly treacherous things", Bunty says to Tom in The Vortex. "Nothing but the ceaseless din of trying to be amused", Nicky complains as he quizzes his mother about her reckless infidelities. The Vortex establishes an extreme of that kind of irresponsibility which is supported by leisure, financial abundance, social superiority in the English manner, and anxious self-confidence. The pretence of that small social class is clearly exposed, but the play's "vortex of beastliness" amounts to little other than the philandering of idle mediocrities and the courted self-destruction of their nervy offspring. "It's the fault of circumstances and civilization—civilization makes rottenness so much easier." Nicky's generalisation is as wobbly as Coward's attempt to put him on the side of life, almost as if he realised that, if he hadn't, The Vortex would have been as nihilistic as the lives it portrayed. It amounts to a kind of restraint.
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