“I’d start with Ballet Shoes first. It’s my favourite,” Meg Ryan’s character urges a mother in a bookstore in Nora Ephron’s 1998 romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail. Never out of print since it was first published in 1936, Noel Streatfeild’s “Story of Three Children on the Stage” has been a favourite with generations of readers, including former Children’s Laureate Jacqueline Wilson. Although adapted twice for television, Ballet Shoes has never been made into a play before. This Christmas, the National Theatre in London is staging it for the first time.
Three foundling girls – Pauline, Petrova and Posy – fetch up at a dilapidated house on the Cromwell Road some time in the 1920s, having been rescued by roving palaeontologist Great Uncle Matthew – “Gum”. Left in the care of his adult niece Sylvia (another orphan) and her old nanny, the girls become the Fossil sisters. They grow up in a spirited matriarchy of genteel poverty and plucky determination to follow their passions – acting, engineering and ballet. Described by Streatfeild as “a fairy story with its feet halfway on the ground”, Ballet Shoes is the perfect tale for our own age of austerity.
