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.
