Vanity Fair

Published Tuesday 25 March 2008 at 09:55 by Thom Dibdin

Rising from the detritus of designer Neil Murray’s lumber room-like set for the Royal Lyceum, the eight-strong cast conjure a twisting, shadow of Thackeray’s sprawling novel. The contrasting fortunes of lowly but wily Becky Sharp (Sophia Linden) and highborn but reticent Amelia Sedley (Kim Gerard) loom, solidly entertaining, at its heart. Yet there is a reticence to take their characters to the extremes that might have brought more focus to Thackeray’s amoral discussion of the nature of vanity.

Director Tony Cownie has excelled in finding the slickness and the humour of Declan Donnellan’s script. It is enthralling stuff, as the scenes morph one into the next and actors switch between character and narrator roles. Steven McNicoll has great fun as Joseph Sedley, Amelia’s gross brother, as well as various of Becky’s seducers. Simon Muller is the model of solid propriety as William Dobbin, Amelia’s true admirer. He brings the sharpest focus on the vanities of early 19th-century society that Thackeray so brilliantly satirised.

Elsewhere it is the human core that is brought out most. Matthew Pidgeon has a ball in his secondary roles and brilliantly portrays the crumbling of Rawdon Crawley’s world as he fails to keep up with his wife. Antony Eden finds the emotional vacuum in Amelia’s hedonistic husband George Osbourne.

At the piano on stage throughout, Jon Beales’ musical accompaniment helps carry the plot and hints at the ancillary nuances that the novel gave its original readers, but these are lost to modern audiences without an intimate knowledge of English life and society in Napoleonic times.