For its big Christmas show, the National Theatre has cooked up an absolute treat, said Nick Curtis in The London Standard. Noel Streatfeild’s much-loved children’s novel “Ballet Shoes” (1936) is about three female foundlings who are adopted by an eccentric paleontologist, and brought up, during his long absences, by his niece on the Cromwell Road in London.
Posy is a budding ballerina, Pauline is a gifted actress and Petrova proves to be a natural mechanic, who dreams of being a pilot. This first major stage adaptation, written by Kendall Feaver and directed by Katy Rudd, honours the spirit of the book, but is also its own thing – and it works brilliantly. “Suffused with gung-ho spirit, exuberance and larky wit”, it is a celebration of plucky young women and “never puts a foot wrong”.
Feaver and Rudd have done a “magnificent job”, agreed Sarah Crompton on What’s on Stage. Their imaginative staging bursts with heart and soul, and “makes a story that is full of love for the self-realising powers of theatre and dance into a transformative experience in itself”.
In one lovely touch, said Alice Saville in The Independent, the evening starts with a chorus of dancers in teal tutus flooding the auditorium, teaching the children ballet moves and then using costumes to “create the world of the play in richly detailed, dreamlike style”. Similar care is lavished on “each and every scene” in a production that is as “delicately balanced as a dancer en pointe as it leaps between its period setting and the present”, enriching the tale in ways that “never feel lazy or jarring”.
Frankie Bradshaw’s set design is a thing of wonder, said Clive Davis in The Times – a “Harry Potter-ish evocation of a rackety London home that is part boarding house, part cabinet of curiosities”.
The performances, too, are terrific across the board, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph – and the whole thing has a dizzying lightness of touch. There are tickets left for later performances, but be quick: once word spreads, I predict “a very un-balletic stampede to the box office”.
National Theatre, London SE1. Until 22 February