Theatre - Sheridan Morley on conflicts of colour in Noel Coward and August Wilson

Michael Grandage's artistic directorship of the Donmar Warehouse opens with a revival of The Vortex. In a thoughtful programme note, Philip Hoare, Noel Coward's latest biographer, pinpoints the social and sexual significance of the play that made Coward the shocking darling of a very conservative and cowardly West End.

No executor of the Coward estate could fail to be cheered by the news that the most successful and revolutionary theatre company in London wished to open a new chapter with an 80-year-old play by an actor-dramatist once held up, if only by the Royal Court, as an example of all that was out of date and dangerously irrelevant about the West End. So it is high time for a Coward revival.

Coward's earliest plays were light, intermittently elegant, and suggested that he might become Pimlico's answer to Frederick Lonsdale. The Vortex changed all that. In 1924, this play, Coward's first major hit at the age of 24, was seriously radical. At this distance, when plays about sex and drugs and incest abound, how do we remember that this was the first? The Lord Chamberlain nearly banned it, not on grounds of sex or drugs, but on the dubious basis that it brought high society into disrepute, showing these people to be shallow, pretentious and seeking new sensation whatever the human cost. Only Coward himself, reading it to the Lord Chamberlain four days before its opening night, retrieved it from the blue pencil.

Critical reactions elsewhere to Grandage's new production are likely to focus on his radical decision to cast a black actor of considerable authority and distinction (Chiwetel Ejiofor, who starred in Blue/ Orange) in Coward's own leading role of Nicky Lancaster. To compound the curiosity of the casting, both his parents are played by white actors. Francesca Annis is quite wondrous as Florence, the dreadful, beautiful, selfish, vain mother. These choices seem to dare us to notice the disjunction caused by the presence of a person who would most certainly not have been there in 1924.

Grandage's production is, in all other ways, very formal and traditional, the movements choreographed like a gavotte, the clothes and furnishings strictly of the period, the acting style of the other characters too, too Twenties, darling, and perfectly divine. Only Nicky doesn't fit. Not nervous or febrile, this supposedly drug-addicted, hysterical hedonist is played by Ejiofor as a nice, sensible boy trying to connect with his loathsome mother on the grounds that because she is addicted to sex, she should understand his addiction to cocaine.

The Donmar's production of The Vortex is sober and intelligent, the cast well chosen. Bette Bourne, dressed as a man (actually, if you look closely, he is a man), is a fine vicious old queen. Deborah Findlay finds the humanity in Florence's best friend. Ejiofor jars, not because he looks out of place but because he is stylistically 80 years away from the other characters.

If The Vortex is about a specific community, in a particular place, at a certain time in history, it has much in common with King Hedley II at the Tricycle. But this is a very different community, its location the slums of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in the 1980s. All August Wilson's major plays are set in Pittsburgh, each in a different decade of the 20th century, and collectively - King Hedley II is the eighth and there are to be two more - they are a minutely observed portrait of African Americans, and their journey, as Wilson puts it, "from property to people".

It can be hard work. The play is long (more than three hours) and written in the vernacular of the black working poor, and some of the cast in Paulette Randall's faithful production seem to be suffering under the delusion that Pittsburgh is in the Deep South. There are few laughs. Wilson is no comedy writer, but there are a couple of comic performances: from Eddie Nestor as the good-natured fool who asks the police for copies of his mugshots to give his relatives, and from that fine character actor Joseph Marcell as the old rogue who provides the only real plot, even if it is a side-trip from the story of King himself.

King is a small-time big shot who never quite makes the big time. Full of anger and bluster, intelligence without common sense, and a permanent chip of injustice, he is unable to alter his failure rate, whether he's trying to rob a store, live up to his father, or just grow a bunch of flowers for his wife in the front yard. As played by Nicholas Monu, he becomes just the bully on the block, not the mysterious symbol of what has gone wrong in the ghetto which Brian Stokes Mitchell was on Broadway.

The Vortex is at the Donmar Warehouse, London WC2 (020 7369 1732) until 15 February

King Hedley II is at the Tricycle, London NW6 (020 7328 1000) until 8 February

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