The Vortex at Chichester Festival Theatre

Joshua James and Lia Williams   

The roaring twenties. A world in flux. The magnetic Florence Lancaster draws people to her like moths to a flame. But when her son Nicky arrives home from Paris with an unexpected fiancée and a secret, it sets off a chain of events which threatens to pull them all into a maelstrom.

Noël Coward’s brilliantly witty and stinging portrait of the darkness beneath the glittering surface of the Jazz Age is as vivid today as when it premiered, causing a sensation and catapulting its young writer to his first great success.

Daniel Raggett, nominee for the 2022 Evening Standard Emerging Talent Award, directs this new production in which Florence and Nicky Lancaster are played by mother and son, Lia Williams and Joshua James.

Lia Williams’s multi award-winning roles include Wallis Simpson in The Crown, and on stage Mary Stuart (Almeida & West End) and John Gabriel Borkman (The Bridge). Her critically-acclaimed production of Doubt was seen at Chichester last year. Joshua James returns to the Festival Theatre where he appeared in the Young Chekhov trilogy as Nikolai in Platonov and Konstantin in The Seagull (for which he was nominated for an Ian Charleson Award), both also at the National Theatre.

The cast also include Priyanga Burford as Helen; her work includes Consent (National Theatre), The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare’s Globe), and TV’s Industry, Innocent and Press.