It's “Charles Dickens on acid” on the Brighton stage

Simona Hughes, who is directing the show, said: “It is larger than life characters, it is very satirical and it is great fun. It has been rarely adapted for the stage. It's been done for film on and TV but most people have shied away from doing it on stage but we spent six months distilling it and finding the essence that we worked on. We had a week devising movement for the ensemble before we even got into the text. We were discovering ways of creating different environments for the show.

“And the response so far has been really good. Audiences seem to absolutely love it, and we have had some wonderful feedback. It's all the notes that we would have been aiming for. It is storytelling that seems to sweep people up and take them along on the journey.”

Performances include Brighton Open Air Theatre on July 3 and 4 and Lewes Castle on August 9 and 10.

“The company is me and Joanna Nevin and Martin South. We were working on different projects over many years but this company only formed in 2023 on the back of Martin and Jo doing a production of Macbeth, which Martin directed and Jo produced and they both acted in. It toured to quite a lot of the venues that we are still attached to and are still touring to now, but on the back of that they asked me to join them to form a new company with a production of Much Ado About Nothing. We decided to start with Shakespeare to find our feet and also to find our audiences. We wanted a good household name to give us a good start.

“The idea behind the company is to rediscover classics that we could dig deep into and find contemporary resonances. It's reimagining either adaptations or classic texts and looking for a playful interpretation. We are certainly playful and we are interested in theatrical devices. There is a lot of movement and music. Music is very central to our productions, and being outdoors it is very much about the live relationship that we have with our audiences. We are a summer company and we're trying to uncover what the stories can tell us about theatricality.

“Vanity Fair is an epic novel. It's full of themes like people performing and trying to climb in society, and it is also about greed and betrayal and love. I think for us we found that there was a bit of everything there and enough for us to have a lot of fun with it and find all the opportunities to see where it resonates with contemporary audiences in terms of the performative nature of society.”