How wonderful to end the year at the National on an upsurge of purpose and pleasure. It was an inspired idea to dramatise Ballet Shoes. Noel Streatfeild’s novel, which has never been out of print since it was first published in 1936, set ambition beating under hundreds of small liberty bodices. Now adapter Kendall Feaver and director Katy Rudd have not simply sent the original text pirouetting over the stage but subtly rewired it for today.
The story of the three Fossil girls (who, abandoned by different parents, take their surname from the wandering palaeontologist who rescued them from peril in faraway lands) springs from a long-ago England of prams and pigtails. Yet it is shaded by easily recognisable states of uncertainty, displacement and determination. Which am I?, generations of readers have asked themselves. Pauline, who has a gift for acting and a weakness for vanity, is played ardently by Grace Saif. Posy the ballet dancer, who single-mindedly, ruthlessly pursues her clear destiny, is a gracefully spinning Daisy Sequerra. Independent Petrova, who turns her back on the prevailing arty atmosphere and goes in for motorcars and aviation, is, despite the show’s title, equally inspiring: bold-eyed Yanexi Enriquez flies high above the audience in a display of gymnastics and courage. In the end what truly counts is the passion that propels each of them. Everyone fights for a future: no entitlement, no inheritance. They are are not, they keep reminding each other, dependent on a grandfather’s name.
Frankie Bradshaw – bright light of stage design – captures the generosity of the household: shabby, adorned with the skeletons of ancient creatures, cavernous but cramped. Here the migrant heroines are supervised and lit up by their artist guardian and the lodgers: a flamboyant dancer; the owner of a fabulous car; an English teacher who is crisply interrogated by her pupil: “Are you a lesbian?”
There are more women than men in this story, though Justin Salinger agiley bridges the gap with his sinuous renditions of Great Uncle Matthew and Madame Fidolia. That’s no limitation. Plenty here for chaps to learn; plenty for everyone to rejoice in.
Director Max Webster is providing a series of thrills. Last year Macbeth, with David Tennant, Cush Jumbo and headphones. Now The Importance of Being Earnest: all orchidaceous effrontery. A prelude features Ncuti Gatwa (sometime Doctor Who but now Algie) seated at a grand piano, dressed in shocking-pink cutaway gown, ogling. After this – newsflash: Oscar Wilde was gay! – the cast appear in variations on 1895 costume, but there is no Victorian corseting of fabric, gesture or word.
One of Gatwa’s glimmering three-pieces (Rae Smith’s costumes are themselves a gorgeous drama) is patterned all over in grapes and what might be, mmm, pansies. Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ fizzes as Gwendolen, poking her head around the door to waggle her tongue at Jack. The dimly decent Miss Prism and Canon Chasuble supply an unexpected sexual ripple as reinvented by Amanda Lawrence (pipe-cleaner body) and subtly simmering Richard Cant. When the pairs of youngish would-be-lovers are briefly tangled together they almost, wishfully, end up pairing off boy-boy, girl-girl. Never has “bunberrying” – code for leading a double life – been so clearly the key to the play. Never has that “n” in the first syllable sounded so much like a mistake.
I would have thought that crashing in and out of convention, underlining the risqué, would crush Wilde’s celebrated witticisms. Actually, it releases them. Lines are delivered not archly but with ease. Sharon D Clarke’s Lady Bracknell – enormous yellow straw hat, fabric with huge roses as big as faces – is a marvel, dropping her mots from a great height in a Caribbean accent. She makes “a handbag” sound like a strange little beast.
Gatwa is physically comic, though he phrases over-emphatically. Eliza Scanlen crackles as Cecily: dimpling and dirty. Hugh Skinner, so blush-making in W1A, brings a beautifully judged hesitation-and-blurt quality to Jack. Every nook and cranny of this brightly lit (thanks for the gaudiness, Jon Clark) production is ornate. Julian Bleach serves both as a doddering footman with a powdered wig as long as his thorax, and a manservant who carries a straw to take sips from his master’s drink. I had half-forgotten how (im)purely funny Wilde’s drama of double lives could be.
The Devil Wears Prada – book by Kate Wetherhead, lyrics Shaina Taub and Mark Sonnenblick, music by Elton John – has been announced as the Dominion’s fastest selling show, with its run extended till next autumn. In fact, the devil does not have all the best tunes. This new adaptation of David Frankel’s 2006 movie (based on Lauren Weisberger’s bestseller) sticks so closely to the original that I began counting the dropped lines. All the plot is there: dowdy would-be writer Andy gets glamorised by ferocious magazine editor Miranda Priestly but finally recovers her soul. Yet the film’s allure is missing: the movie is funny and quick; it doesn’t denounce, it satirises. Director Jerry Mitchell’s big, smooth production is all-out declamation.
John’s music – power ballads, rock, disco – pounds remorselessly: my Apple Watch went wild with you-are-damaging-your-ears warnings. Mitchell’s angry, ugly choreography sets everyone marching catwalk-style and punching the air as if they were at a political rally. Gregg Barnes’s costumes are sharp, but often more aggressive than alluring: boxy suits, a fab gown of scarlet sequin, teetering heels – with one terrible excursion into sub-mermaid chiffon frocks.
Fascinating detail has been flattened. The scene in which Miranda’s arrival scares everyone into a tiz is shrewdly revealing in the movie, with each staff member scooping up a file or a coffee cup. Here they are just busy looking busy. Miranda’s celebrated riff on cerulean has Meryl Streep, without widening her eyes, delivering evocative history and giving spine to her personality. On stage the episode is just another putdown.
The best scene is a rare piece of invention: Amy Di Bartolomeo’s vivacious sneerer Emily cops off with a hot nurse. Vanessa Williams’s Miranda – rising as if from the underworld (get it?) – is focused, whiplike; as Andy, Georgie Buckland is appealing but bland. Still, they never fight free of the movie. It’s a new brand: the cinematic straitjacket.
The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary is of course one big joke. John Nicholson’s 2016 play fillets Flaubert’s novel and comes up with a caper for four actors, vigorously directed by Kirstie Davis. Two ratcatchers threaten Emma B’s plans to kill herself when they buy up all the arsenic from the local pharmacie. Georgia Nicholson flashes her pantaloons and her views on the patriarchy. Stephen Cavanagh, Ben Kernow and Darren Seed play, among others, farmhand, mother superior, beadle, marchioness and goofy, slightly Faragy husband (just watching him scrape his tongue on the wedding night is enough to make you understand his wife’s need for romantic escape).
Marion Harrison’s tiny, nifty design evokes provincial French life with check curtains and a good display of poisons. Aprons are pre-spattered from blood letting; an amputated leg (rubber) is wagged; Emma is fumbled in the woods by a seducer who whisks coloured streamers and a magician’s wand from various private parts; the cast freeze in exaggerated horror reactions and break out from the play to chinwag with the audience. No fresh lights on a great novelist, but much stage jollity.
Star ratings (out of five)
Ballet Shoes ★★★★
The Importance of Being Earnest ★★★★
The Devil Wears Prada ★★
The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary ★★★
Ballet Shoes is at the Olivier, National Theatre, London, until 22 February 2025
The Importance of Being Earnest is at the Lyttelton, National Theatre, London, until 25 January 2025
The Devil Wears Prada is at the Dominion, London, until 18 October 2025
The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary is at the Southwark Playhouse, London, until 11 January 2025
