Writers: Joanna Nevin, Martin South and Simona Hughes, adapted from the novel by William Makepeace Thackeray
Director: Simona Hughes
William Makepeace Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair, a satire of British society in the early 1800s, is written as if it were a performance piece. Its prologue sets up the characters as puppets, the narrator a puppeteer using them to tell his morality play.
Perhaps that’s why the work has been so frequently adapted to other performance means, primarily film and television. Here, Moving Parts Theatre Company takes the work and presents it as if being told by a troupe of multi-roling travelling Victorian players who have parked their cart for the evening, roped out a space and are about to put on the puppeteer’s show, with themselves as Thackeray’s marionettes.
And that is, effectively, what Moving Parts are doing, taking their outdoor adaptation around the country, never stopping in one location for more than two days. To fit with the vibe, a few circus skills are in evidence, from stilt-walking to fire-eating. Nothing essential to the plot, but as a means of enhancing the company’s framing device, it works a treat.
The bulk of the novel, and the play, revolves around Amelia Sedley (Anna Blackburn), born into a wealthy family that is later forced into penury by the Napoleonic Wars and her schoolfriend, Katrina Michaels’s Becky Sharp. Becky’s social origins are distinctly different from Amelia’s, compelling her to seek marriage to maintain any semblance of social status. And so begins a long history of Becky’s social climbing and perceived manipulation of the men around her.
The intersection of the two women’s lives involves the rest of the cast in multiple roles, although Jahrys Greenidge as Amelia’s husband George (and, later, their son Georgie) and Martin South as her brother Joseph stand out in those early scenes. Joanna Nevin also comes across well as Rawdon Crawley, the man whom Becky marries and, seemingly with his wife’s connivance, proceeds to fleece George out of much of his income.
The low-fi nature of the travelling show means that much of the scene-setting is limited to costume changes, although at times sheets, hula hoops and umbrellas are used to portray everything from horse-drawn carriages to dining tables. Lines are generally declaimed much more loudly and falsely than modern theatre would generally permit. That’s partly necessary due to the outdoor setting, where the players must work against both the noise of trees blowing in the wind and that of couples arguing as they stomp down the street behind the stage. However, it also aligns with the style of mummery that this company employs; this is a morality play that instructs and warns us.
That said, Tom Beattie’s performance as William Dobbin, the work’s most upright and least self-serving character, is much more naturalistically delivered. His quiet sensitivity while everyone else around is looking out for themselves offers a particularly rich counterpoint to Thackeray’s other characters. By not leaning into their excesses quite so much, Beattie’s Dobbin feels much more like us – or at least, the version of us that the author would have us wish to be.
Circus elements are reintroduced sparingly throughout the show, most effectively when comparing Becky’s navigation of the upper echelons of the English social class system to that of a high-wire act.
And as the puppets prepare to pack themselves away and travel on to the next site for their show, Michaels finishes the show (and takes her bows) on stilts. Like Becky, she has ascended, but is alone, set apart from those she would love. It’s a fitting end to a morality tale that benefits from Moving Parts’s fun adaptation. Vanity Fair may have been created as something of a Victorian puppet show, but its messages ring true today.
Reviewed on 26 June 2025 and tours until 10 August 2025
