Theater Review: Thackeray’s ‘Vanity Fair,’ From The Pearl Theatre Co.

Like its crafty female protagonist, Becky Sharp, Vanity Fair—the Pearl Theatre Co. production that closed this past weekend—was nothing if not ambitious. In adapting the 1848 “novel without a hero” by William Makepeace Thackeray, actress/playwright Kate Hamill boiled down a sprawling masterpiece covering 30 years to approximately 20 named characters, embodied by seven actors. It may, in fact, have moved even faster than social-climbing Becky; events and characters were compressed, telegraphed even, into somewhat less than 2½ hours. A nuance or two might have gotten lost along the way, but really, who cares?

“Who are you to judge?” Becky demanded accusingly of the audience. Who, indeed? The odds against survival in early 19^th century England are stacked against Becky, the daughter of a Frenchwoman who, scandalously, appeared on the stage. A governess job might serve the likes of Jane Eyre, but why stop there when you can aim so much higher?

In a sense, Becky can be seen as a Regency England precursor of Scarlett O’Hara, another conniver who uses her intelligence and feminine wiles in a society upended by a tumultuous war (in the case of Becky, the Napoleonic wars that end with the bloodbath at Waterloo). At the same time, one has to be a bit careful about enlisting Thackeray as a proto-feminist, as he gave precious little assistance to Charlotte Bronte when she asked his help as she and sisters Emily and Anne tried to get a hearing for their novels in the patriarchal publishing industry of their time.

But for the Pearl troupe’s feminist angle, that’s their story, and they were sticking to it. I thought that viewers might be more vexed by the breathless, even breakneck pace dictated by director Eric Tucker. Just as Becky careens from one (mis)adventure to another, so do the tables, chairs, and other furniture that serves as the play’s locales. The actors sprinted around, too, changing accents, costumes, wigs, even their sex as most of them assumed multiple roles. It was a challenge to keep it all straight in the play’s running time. 

In the performance I attended late in the show’s run, the understudy Kaileela Hobby filled in for Hamill, who originated the role of Becky. It would have been interesting to see how Hobby physically embodied a Becky she had created on paper, but Ms. Hobby was a more than capable substitute.

The other cast member with a single role was Joey Parsons as Becky’s schoolgirl friend Amelia—a thankless part due to the character’s almost willful naivete.  Parsons did all that she could to keep her from dissolving in a simpering puddle.

Also of note in this production: Debargo Sanyal, who gave Amelia’s husband, the doomed rakish soldier George Osborne, an appropriate Donald Trump-ish pout; Brad Heberlee, who made Amelia’s brother, Jos Sedley, a hilarious mark for Becky; and Zachary Fine, equally good as the licentious Lord Steyne and the Stage Manager, a winking ringmaster for these proceedings.

Last fall, the Pearl Theatre mounted a fine revival of Shelagh Delaney’s 1958 comedy-drama A Taste of Honey (see my review in this prior post), which, though a century removed from Vanity Fair, also spotlights a young woman struggling to rise above circumstance and class. The two plays could not seem more germane to our own time of limited horizons and national upheaval. One awaits eagerly what this longtime Off-Broadway troupe will come up with this fall.

Waterloo at 200: Thackeray, on a Vanished ‘Great Game of War’

"His pulse was throbbing and his cheeks flushed: the great game of war was going to be played, and he one of the players. What a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure! What tremendous hazards of loss or gain! What were all the games of chance he had ever played compared to this one?"—Captain George Osborne, anticipating the Battle of Waterloo, in William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847).

Today marks the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, which over the years has acquired reams of significance: as the making of one general (the Duke of Wellington) and the unmaking of another (Napoleon), as the closing of the dreams of one Continental power (France) and the opening of another (Prussia-turned-German), and even of the battle itself as a synonym for definitive disaster (“met his Waterloo”).

My post from five years ago gives the particulars of the battle. But more can be said for the significance of that day. Indeed it was, by William Makepeace Thackeray, in Vanity Fair, his satire published early in the Victorian Era.

Thackeray looked back from the perspective of 30 years with an irony that sounds like it could have come from the 20^th century, or our own.  The viewpoint in the above quote comes not from a general, but from a soldier. George Osborne is a gambler, a spendthrift, a snob and, despite marriage to Amelia, a ladies’ man. His feeling of remorse on the eve of battle, as he senses the possibility that he might leave Amelia a widow, is soon overcome by “a fierce excitement of doubt, hope, and pleasure.”

That rush feeling would be cruelly disabused by a battle where, as British man of letters A.N. Wilson noted in a retrospective for Britain’s Daily Mail, “The scale of the casualties involved is inhumanly shocking — one in four men on the battlefield was killed.” (The aftermath had its own horrors: So many teeth were removed from the corpses to supply the dentures of the living that the phenomenon became known as “Waterloo Teeth.”)

The carnage of the battle even shocked a hardened soldier like Wellington, who wrote afterward: “My heart is broken by the terrible loss I have sustained in my old friends and companions and my poor soldiers. Believe me, nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

But somehow, the grand illusion of war continued half a world away even after Thackeray’s anti-heroic view, for American participants in the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. If the romance of war can be said to have died, it was 100 years after Waterloo, in the muddy trenches and gas attacks of WWI.

Not that war itself has died. Oh, no. But nobody will ever be able to rush off to arms again, as George Osborne did, without knowing beforehand that it would involve a grim, nasty business indeed.

(For a fascinating blog post on the battle, see “The Battle of Waterloo in 16 Objects” from the British Library’s “Untold Lives” blog.)

(The image accompanying this post comes from the 1998 British miniseries Vanity Fair, with Tom Ward as the doomed and dumb Captain Osborne.)