Vanity Fair by Kate Hamill (review)

William Makepeace Thackeray’s 1,600-page Vanity Fair appeared in nineteen installments of Punch magazine during 1848–49. Since then, his rapacious anti-heroine Becky Sharp has inspired conversation, debate, and adaptations to film, television, and the stage. Kate Hamill’s adaptation retains Thackeray’s story, although there are many necessary cuts and elisions; her largest and most effective intervention is in breaking the monopoly of Thackeray’s narrator and allowing the two heroines to speak for themselves. Under the direction of Jessica Stone, this production charmed easily but, like its most infamous heroine, had claws, evoking contemporary parallels with fake news and our persistent hang-ups about ambitious “nasty women” who won’t stay down.

Hamill has made a name with feminist adaptations of classical novels (Sense and Sensibility [2014], Pride and Prejudice [2017], Little Women [2018]) and sees her work as analogous to new play development, an active collaboration between herself and the original author. Stone, who has brought her insightful eye to classics since her all-male A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum in 2010, here offered svelte and impeccably choreographed staging that gave the impression of glitz and sparkle with nary a sequin. Together, they served up a hugely entertaining but always thoughtful tale about class, gender, and ambition.

Both novel and play open with a theatrical framing device. Thackeray used a puppet show; here, we found ourselves in an abandoned, shabby-chic Victorian music hall (Alexander Dodge) with a company of vaudevillians in Regency-era costumes (Jennifer Moeller). This setting invited a performance style that could slide from moustache-twirling bravado to intimate appeal, historical time to contemporary resonance, in a moment. As a stand-in for Thackeray’s omniscient narrator, Hamill provided the troupe’s Manager (Dan Hiatt), a choral figure who helped us navigate the whirly-gig of fortune as it spun out the parallel but opposing trajectories of its two heroines, scrappy orphan Becky Sharp (Rebekah Brockman) and genteel, privileged Amelia Sedley (Maribel Martinez). Becky claws her way through one scheme after another, very nearly securing fortune and privilege before losing all; Amelia marries a man who does not love her, loses him, and declines into poverty while refusing her faithful follower Dobbin until the final moments. Throughout the evening, the Manager periodically drew the heroines together to comment overtly upon the restrictions of class and gender that alter their perspectives to what is good and what is right. Amelia, we see, bears both the privilege and the burden of upholding the norms of her gender and class; such norms offer Becky no advantages, so she uses and discards them as suits her aspirations. Amelia cannot comprehend another way; neither can Becky. As the flatulent and inflexible Matilda Crawley (a patron-turned-enemy of Becky’s) puts it, “never be too good, nor too bad. The world will punish you for both” (Hamill 45). The trick of it, Hamill shows, is that for women then and now the game is rigged and there is no winning. It is an exhaustingly timely refrain.

Although many have condemned and celebrated these two women since the story first appeared, Hamill does not want us smugly judging from the dark. She translates the novel’s layers of metafiction into a meta-theatrical style that plays constantly with the line between then and now, collapsing the distance between us and them. Brockman’s fierce, plucky Becky, refusing to simper and flatter without a piratical gleam in her eye and a wink to the audience, was irresistible. The audience was more tepid with Martinez’s Amelia, poor thing, who keeps following the rules like a dolt and getting nowhere; it was an effective trap. When, late in the second act, Amelia turned to the audience and excoriated us for thinking her stupid and weak, audible gasps betrayed a collective guilty conscience. The confrontation reoriented...