The Vortex at Artscape

Elizabeth Nienaber and Thomas Thorne in The Vortex.

The Cape Town City Ballet will present Marc Goldberg’s dance adaptation of Noel Coward’s hugely controversial play, The Vortex, at the Artscape Theatre, from Friday July 15 until Saturday July 23.

The ballet explores themes of drug addiction in the 1920’s high society, adultery, ageing and dysfunctional family dynamics over the course of a weekend in the country home of David and Florence Lancaster.

We follow Florence through the return of her son, Nicky, and his new-found fiancée, Bunty, from Paris and the gradual understanding that Nicky is harbouring a dark secret.

Florence’s obsession with youth and beauty is displayed in her constant affairs with much younger men, in this case the dashing Tom, her current lover and a school friend of her son, and proves to be a greater challenge than anticipated.

All this and more culminates into an explosion that irrevocably changes the lives of those involved.

Musically, the unspoken tensions are experienced through the juxtaposing composers.

Mr Coward’s live recordings of hits such as Poor Little Rich Girl, I went to a Marvelous Party and Mad about the Boy are combined with Mexican electronic composer Murcof’s atmospheric and sophisticated style to create a varied, and sometimes chilling, canvas of the human perspective, while working in the frame of Mr Coward’s glamour and frivolity and the opulence of the era.

Dancers featuring in this ballet include Laura Bosenberg, Thomas Thorne, Kim Vieira, Daniel Szybkowski, Xola Putye, Elizabeth Nienaber, Ivan Boonzaaier and Marc Goldberg himself.

On the same programme is Kirsten Isenberg’s ballet, created in 2014, called Of Gods & Men, danced to the atmospheric music of Armand Amor and Philip Rombi. You will also see a piece that was written by Robin van Wyk in 2010 as part of the production Poetry in Motion, called Funeral Blues.

The show is at 8pm, with matinees at 2.30pm on Saturday and 3pm on the Sunday. Tickets cost between R150 and R180.

Book at Computicket or Artscape Dial-a-Seat on 021 421 7695 or visit www.capetowncity ballet.org.za for more information.