Hooray, it’s back! This adaptation of Noel Streatfield’s no-nonsense, serio-comic 1936 children’s classic blew me away at the National last year and now it’s returned, mostly recast and slightly tinkered with at the edges. The story of three spirited foundling girls forging careers in the arts and engineering, and creating a family from the misfit denizens of an Earl’s Court boarding house, thrills again with its spry visual ingenuity and gung-ho warmth.
Adapter Kendall Feaver subtly updates the generous spirit of the book. Director Katy Rudd fills the auditorium with delight, from the pre-show moment when male and female supernumeraries in tutus teach the audience to do a plié. The box-of tricks set confirmed Frankie Bradshaw as one of our most ingenious designers last year and the choreography by Ellen Kane remains a joy.
Above all, this revival has a new trio of superlative young leads in Nina Cassells, Sienna Arif-Knights and Scarlett Monahan as Pauline, Petrova and Posy Fossil. This show marks Arif-Knights’s stage debut, and to see her not only command the Olivier auditorium but fly exuberantly over it is as good a metaphor for the transforming power of art as you’re likely to find.
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Ballet Shoes isn’t just about art though – it’s about what brings meaning and passion to your life. Pretty much the only major character not recast is Justin Salinger’s great-uncle Matthew, aka ‘Gum’, a palaeontologist-explorer who pursues his vocation to the ends of the earth despite shipwrecks, avalanches and a wittily visualised amputation.
Encountering two orphaned babies and another given up by a ballerina, he blithely ships them home to Sylvia (Anoushka Lucas), the great-niece he grudgingly took in, aged 11, at the start of the play. Still a teenager, Sylvia could be a talented artist, or scientist, or both, but she knuckles down to master plumbing, electrics and proxy parenting at his rickety house at 999 Cromwell Road, with the help of old-fashioned housekeeper Nana (Lesley Nicol).
Impecuniosity compels them to take in lodgers – a nightclub dancer (Nadine Higgin), a lesbian literature professor (Pandora Colin) and an Indian mechanic (Raj Bajaj) – who differently inspire the three girls. The issue of adults taking an interest in under-16s is addressed squarely and neutralised.
Pauline, Petrova and Posy start out bratty and bickering, but having chosen the surname ‘Fossil’ themselves, swear a pact to make their own careers and earn money to support the household. This begins at a stage school where Posy shows promise in dance, Pauline learns she’s better at acting, and Pavlova wishes she could be fixing cars or flying planes. The big set pieces here are hilarious whether or not you get the references to Bauhaus ballet and Peter Brook’s Midsummer Night’s Dream.
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As well as the absent-presumed-dead GUM, Salinger plays the two exasperated male directors and the two etiolated grand dames of dance who bring Pauline and Posy on. As so often in this show, the swapping of genders and traditional roles makes the more weaponised takes on the subject seem absurd.
There’s a lovely moment where Salinger’s demanding, aged Russian danseuse, Madame Fidolia, is confronted with her younger, prima ballerina self in a bank of mirrors. Equally deft are the twin scenes where first Pauline and then Sylvia hide, fully dressed, in the bath of the Cromwell Road House, with a basin tap running so no one can hear them crying.
There is an aching tenderness to Lucas’s performance as Sylvia – whose own childhood was overtaken by responsibility – and Nicol’s as the staunchly Christian but infinitely adaptable Nana. The three young leads work beautifully if antagonistically together and get to shine separately in showcase scenes. The supporting cast is solid. I think there have been some tweaks to the script and some of them slow the action down. Whatever. This is a splendid piece of inventive theatre that’s also great family entertainment. Its encore is deserved.
To 21 Feb, nationaltheatre.org.uk.
