Lia Williams interview: The Vortex (The Sunday Times)

Lia Williams and Joshua James are playing unhappy families on stage. Real life is very different, they tell Dominic Maxwell

The first time Lia Williams saw her new co-star on stage, he was a four-year-old boy playing the role of a soldier. “I thought, ‘Odd casting,’ ” she says of Joshua James, who is now playing her son in a revival of Noël Coward’s first hit, The Vortex, at the Chichester Festival Theatre. “He was this quiet little drink of water, quite shy. And then up goes the curtain and Joshua was astonishing. I mean, he was a soldier, with the loudest voice I’d ever heard. And in that moment, I went, ‘Yeah, he’s an actor.’ ”