Drama
Vanity Fair the 2012 Play
by Candida Buxton
The 2012 PLAY will be "Vanity Fair”, a dramatisation of the novel Vanity Fair, a novel without a hero by William Makepeace Thackeray.
Vanity Fair is generally considered to be Thackeray’s masterpiece, set at the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the period immediately following it. The book was first published in 1847–48, and is a biting satire of society in early 19th-century England. It has been referred to as ‘Jane Austen with the gloves off’.
The book’s title comes from ‘The Pilgrim’s Progress’ by John Bunyan, which was first published in 1678 and was still widely read at the time of Thackeray’s novel. Vanity fair refers to a stop along the pilgrim’s journey: a never-ending fair held in a town called Vanity, which is meant to represent man’s sinful attachment to worldly things. You must judge for yourselves whether or not it deserves the subtitle ‘a novel without a hero’. The producers have their own views on this one!!
One of Thackeray’s great strengths was his gift for writing dialogue, so transforming the book into a play was really just a question of choosing which dialogues to include, and which events to exclude: with 950 pages of novel to condense into a maximum running time of 2 1/2 hours, this was not always an easy choice. Given that there are always far more girls than boys who audition for the play, one of the reasons I chose to adapt this particular work was the number of roles for women in it, and the quality of those roles. Thackeray’s women are very much three-dimensional characters, and I feel that women in the 21st century can identify easily with most of them, which is not always true of female characters in other 19th-century novels.
The auditions revealed the huge popularity of the play as a major event of the SIS year, with another record number of students auditioning this year. Even with an original cast-list of 102, several new scenes have had to be added to ensure the principle that everyone who auditions gets a part, can be respected. We are now 144 actors, plus dancers, musicians and backstage!!
We have been lucky this year to find a wonderful new theatre in Boulogne, the ‘Carré de Belle Feuille’: it is just a short stroll from the Pont de Sèvres, and as we now have a primary integrated class in Boulogne, it seemed a logical step to bring the play over the river and show our young thespians what the future holds...
| Rehearsals started in early November, tickets go on sale on March 6th and the curtain goes up on Monday, April 2nd. We look forward to seeing you there! |
Dernière modification le 25-02-12 par
