Talk:The Vortex

Serious plays vs. comedies

User:Tim riley, Thanks for the excellent work on this article. I wonder if we also can, or ought to say anything about this: Although this serious drama was Coward's first hit play, most of his subsequent successes were comedies. Did any of your sources discuss why, after such a success, Coward turned to comedy in Hay Fever? I took a look at Coward's bio article, and it doesn't mention anything about the relationship, if any, between serious and comic writing in Coward's works. -- Ssilvers (talk) 19:10, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

The term 'comedy' is a bugger. It ought to mean, and of course sometimes does, a play that provokes lots of laughter. On the other hand it is also applied by the literary experts to plays like Measure for Measure and The Cherry Orchard that aren't funny but aren't littered with corpses either. (I hasten to add that I think The Cherry Orchard is probably, with the possible exception of Waiting for Godot, the greatest play of the 20th century – but it ain't funny.) So, The Vortex is a comedy (of one kind) and was so described at the time – see the press comments reproduced in the article. Hay Fever was actually written before it, and the manager of the Everyman would have preferred to stage that rather than The Vortex, but Coward talked him round, because Hay Fever had no star part for NC to play. Now I stray into OR, but it seems to me that after The Vortex, NC wrote several serious full length plays, none of which were successful. (The revised version of Sirocco (1927) was the biggest debacle of his career, and Easy Virtue and Point Valaine aren't going to elbow Blithe Spirit and Private Lives off their perch.) We should remember, also, that two of the short plays in Tonight at 8.30 were decidedly serious, and in films NC is possibly best known for his serious work – Brief Encounter and In Which We Serve. Sorry to ramble on, but you did ask. – Tim riley talk 20:03, 22 October 2015 (UTC)

So, it appears that it would be difficult and not helpful to try to contextualize The Vortex in Coward's artistic and commercial development. Fair enough. -- Ssilvers (talk)

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