Ballet Shoes review: ‘everything a family show should be’

Ballet Shoes

National Theatre | ★★★★★

Under the outgoing artistic director Rufus Norris the National Theatre has not always delivered seasonal shows of the must-see variety. But this first major stage adaptation of Noel Streatfeild’s children’s classic is everything a family show should be.

Primarily it is a rollicking tale set in 1930s London about three adopted sisters who are taken into the care of wealthy, eccentric palaeontologist, known as GUM (Great Uncle Matthew) to his charges. The babes are each rescued by GUM while on one of his globe-trotting adventures looking for fossils to add to the vast collection he keeps in his rambling house on the Cromwell Road.

This first stage adaptation (there have been TV versions) by Kendall Feaver has a lovely period quality and yet has a modern made-for-21^st century-children sensibility. The action takes place under and in front of a mountain of bookshelves occupied by GUM’s bones.

The children fall under the care of the absent GUM’s housekeeper (Jenny Galloway) and his great niece Sylvia (Pearl Mackie) the orphan who first dissolved the scientist’s resistance to having children in the house.

She arrived at the age of 11. But although he gives her full credit for seeing the possibility that dinosaurs had feathers – a discovery that boosts his career – the fact that Sylvia’s late childhood, adolescence and adulthood is devoted to ensuring that the adopted children are cared for and educated is a somewhat glossed-over sacrifice.

Still, Ballet Shoes – one of the children arrives with a pair as a babe in arms – is an uplifting injunction for each child to find the talent they were born with and make a life from it. There is also a between-the-lines declaration that family has nothing to do with blood relations and everything to do with who has your back when you need it most.

As the immensely likeable sisters Daisy Saquerra, Grace Saif and Yanexi Enriquez embody these messages by depicting three uniquely distinctive personalities whose bond is as strong as loving triplets. Meanwhile Justin Salinger is superb in the multiple roles of the adults whose decisions, unwittingly or not, inform the children’s lives. Also excellent is Asaf Zohar’s music which lends the evening a driving cinematic pulse.