Marc Goldberg’s dance adaptation of Noel Coward’s hugely controversial play, The Vortex, will be presented by Cape Town City Ballet at the Artscape Theatre in Cape Town in July. It’s not to be missed!

The ballet explores themes of drug addiction in 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, we experience the unspoken tensions by the use of juxtaposing composers. Coward’s live recordings of hits like Poor Little Rich Girl, I went to a Marvellous Party and Mad about the Boy are combined with Mexican electronic composer Murcof’s very atmospheric and sophisticated style to create a varied, and sometimes chilling, canvas of the human perspective, while working in the frame of Coward’s glamour and frivolity and the opulence of the era.

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; and a piece that was written by Robin van Wyk in 2010 as part of the production Poetry in Motion, called Funeral Blues.

Showtimes: 8 pm on July 15, 16, 22 and 23; 2.30 pm on July 16 and 23 July; and 3 pm on July 17. Tickets: R150 – R180. Book at Computicket or Artscape Dial-a-Seat on 021 421 7695.

The Artscape Theatre Complex is in DF Malan Street.