Morals and Manners

In The Vortex, his first big success, the young Nicky Lancaster, played by Coward, is a cocaine addict in collision with his mother’s disregard of son and husband—most glaringly evident in her succession of young lovers. Yet the avant-garde subject gets a fairly conventional moral scrutiny in a last-act emotional climax which resembles Hamlet; but though the air is cleared the ‘moral landscape remains ruinous.’ Easy Virtue is a well-made play that transforms Pinero’s Paula Tanqueray into a 1924 ‘modern’ woman who despite a dubious past and the obstacles placed in her way by her mother-in-law remains serene. The characters divide into two camps, the conventional, religious, unforgiving and the open, worldly, tolerant few. A confrontation of conventional attitudes to marriage and free love is the major theme of Sirocco, where Lucy's revolt against a loveless marriage of three years is not sustained by a character or point of view as strong as, say, Larita’s in Easy Virtue. The Marquise is a period piece with traditional theatrical virtues in its plotting, a duel, reversals, etc., and it thematically counterposes youth, love, life and humour against age, asceticism, religion and hypocrisy.