Sophie gets taken to the National Theatre for a Christmas treat of Ballet Shoes…

This week I have been thinking a lot about repeat reading and adaptations. For, just over a week ago, I went to see the National Theatre’s production of Ballet Shoes. And in advance of that, I set myself to re-read the book on which the play was based.

Very special friends invited me and the Birdwatcher to this new adaptation. We were both really excited.

For one thing, we knew it would be an extremely jolly multi-generational evening. (We were not wrong! Exuberant was the word from the Birdwatcher afterwards!)

For another, we have both somewhat got out of the way of going to the theatre, since lockdown. And a wholly new production intrigued us both enormously.

A new play offered all the excitement of uncharted waters.

“Sounds definitely girly,” said the Birdwatcher, when we explained that the source of the story is the 1935 novel Ballet Shoes by Noel Streatfeild. Our kind hosts had read the book as children and loved it. I, too, was a huge fan of the original.

Being rather short on female relatives, he did not know the book and was delighted. He is a great voyager out of his comfort zone in the theatre. And I, like many others, never thought it was a girls’ exclusive anyway.

I Am Introduced to Ballet Shoes 

My own excitement was more nuanced. Ballet Shoes has been much loved by generations of small girls ever since it was first published in 1935. I came to love it too, but only after a slightly sticky start. It was a Christmas present.

It looked very girly and I wasn’t. Anyway, I’d been eased out of my pre-school ballet class — by mutual agreement and considerable kindness — to the relief of all concerned. Ballet really wasn’t my bag.

The book stayed unread on the bookshelf. At least, it did until I got my annual bout of bronchitis in January and ran out of stuff to read.

Image by Victoria from Pixabay

The person who’d given it to me was a seriously pretty and elegant friend of the family. She loved ballet, indeed all forms of dancing and assumed that I, as a little girl, must do so too. (She had two sons. Both keen sports enthusiasts.)

More important, her dresses, when she went to a dance, were pure fairytale. Yards of tulle, rustling satin underskirts, tiny glittery bits in the swirling full length skirts, lace… You get the picture. Fairy godmothers could take her correspondence course.

She even gave me one that had got torn irreparably to play with. “For your dressing up box, darling.”

My dressing up box consisted of a highwayman’s hat and a long cloak that mostly turned me into a spy. My games tended to focus on fighting duels and riding to rescue people a lot. We were not a meeting of minds. I decided to skim read the book just before she next came to tea and shoved it onto the shelf of books that were good for me and I wasn’t going to read again, like The Water Babies.

The Ballet Shoes : Completely Wonderful Phenomenon.

Yet, when I was driven to pick it up in sheer desperation, I didn’t put it down until I finished. It was wonderful. I should have known. All those generations of mothers and daughters and grandmothers couldn’t be wrong.

You may recall the 1998 movie You’ve Got Mail. Sensitive, literary (and very pretty)  bookshop owner Meg Ryan is driven out of business by the big brash pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap multi-storey book warehouse that moves in down the street. Tom Hanks owns it. He knows who she is. She doesn’t know he’s the brash marauder.

In one scene she wanders round the so-called children’s section of the the Hanks Emporium. A mother and daughter are looking for “the Shoes books”. The sales person has no idea what they are talking about. But Meg has inherited her love of children’s books from her mother, who started the shop, and she knows at once. Even though Ballet Shoes and its successors are 50 years old at the time of the script, she can tell the customer what she wants to know and more.

She says, “Noel Streatfeild wrote Ballet Shoes and Dancing Shoes and Skating Shoes and Theatre Shoes… I’d start with Ballet Shoes first, it’s my favourite. Although Skating Shoes is completely wonderful…and it’s out of print.”

On First Reading Ballet Shoes

Well, it wasn’t girly. It is true that all the major characters are female. But this is not a book about dancing or schoolgirl Cinderella fantasies.

Still less is it a tract on female solidarity. Two men play important positive roles in the  life of the children who are the protagonists.

Ballet Shoes is essentially a story about their survival — and fellowship and the kindness of strangers. And growing up.

An eccentric anthropologist (Great Uncle Matthew) finds himself adopting three separate babies, for different reasons. He consigns their care to his young niece and ward, Sylvia, and the household he has set up for her, while he travels in search of fossils. And then he disappears.

In his absence, Sylvia has terrible money problems. She owns their house in the Cromwell Road. She even earns some money from illustrating books. But soon she is driven to take in lodgers.

And the lodgers turn out to be a wonderful bunch, who increase the support group enormously with their advice and skills, as well as their rent. Indeed, it’s on the advice of one, a dancing teacher, that the girls all go to stage school and become able to earn money by their appearances in shows.

On first reading it, I barely noticed Great Uncle Matthew. I was too involved with the adopted sisters and, to a lesser extent, with the adults who are their mentors and support group.

Sylvia, in particular, intrigued me. She wasn’t very confident, could be stubborn and was sometimes wrong. But she always tried to do her best for the girls. They were the priority.

I was still at an age when it had never occurred to me that adults weren’t always right. But I did recognise the instinct to keep secrets from them for their own good.

What I didn’t have, and absolutely loved in Ballet Shoes, were sisters.

When I re-read it again and again as a pre-teen, it was to get back into that world. For the first time, I absorbed the idea of shared experience with people in the same place as you who, at the same time, were seeing things differently.

It was both comforting and truly liberating.

Re-reading Ballet Shoes in 2025

Between moving house and partly down to my mother’s charitable recycling, I have hardly any of my childhood favourites in hard copy. So I bought an e-book copy. This was partly to brief the Birdwatcher and partly to test my own memory.

What I remembered, I had in almost perfect detail.

Image by MaBraS from Pixabay

1. The oldest and in many ways most responsible sister, Pauline, fell in love with Shakespearian verse. She then got insufferable for a while when her first acting engagement was successful. She was demoted and learned her lesson!
2. The middle sister, Petrova, was conscientious but unenthusiastic about performing on stage. She absolutely loved engines and wanted to be a mechanic, at which she was much better than performing.
3. The baby sister, Posy, didn’t understand lots of what was going on and her siblings had to  explain it to her sometimes. She was the only one with real dancing talent.

Image by RoboAdvisor from Pixabay

What I had forgotten — or more likely hadn’t noticed first time round —  was how much of the book was concerned with money. Sylvia’s little family was increasingly precarious and every step in the struggle showed how the need for money affected everyone.

I didn’t remember either how clearly the reader understands the way young performers were auditioned, hired, legally licensed and rehearsed. As the marvellous programme notes explained, Noel Streatfeild had been a professional actress herself for ten years. The sensation of real experience is unmistakable.

No wonder I went back into that wholly real-to-me world again and again.

Ballet Shoes Adapted as a Play 2025

Image by StockSnap from Pixabay

The National Theatre’s version of Ballet Shoes was written by Kendall Feaver. The programme describes it as “a new version”. My first thought was Well, of course; it’s a play and that’s SHORT. My second was At least they’re not saying it’s re-imagined. I’ve learned the hard way not to trust “re-imagined”.

Pretty soon, I was ashamed of myself. As soon as the audience went in, there were girls doing ballet practice arm movements at the front of the auditorium. As members of the audience noticed them, some of the younger and/or more exuberant began to join in. Entering the world, you see. And the play hadn’t even started yet.

Then there was the set. A double storey height of towering dark green shelves loaded with fossils surrounds the stage. It may physically be in the Cromwell Road, walking distance from the V&A. But its reality is Anthropologist’s Dream House, the depository for his findings. Infinitely capacious. It’s huge, but the humans are an afterthought.

I almost purred with pleasure. There was Chapter One fixed in amber.

After that, the story surged along, deviating very little from the original plot. There were two big exceptions.

No, I’m not saying what they were. At least not yet. The play is still on for another month and some of my readers might want to go and see it. This is no time for spoilers.

I will say that I thought one was what I’d always wanted as a reader. And the other was so right that it was probably what Streatfeild wanted, in her heart of hearts, but didn’t quite dare to do.

And above all there was one gorgeous new note. In places it was genuinely funny. The perversely surreal production of Alice in Wonderland by a very precious director made me hoot with laughter, along with the rest of the audience.

But both the acting and direction were so good that there were natural moments of humour throughout the performance.

For instance, the sisters’ reactions to events put in some of the wry humour that could well have been on the written page and wasn’t. But hats off also to Ms Feaver, who gave them the room to find the latent humour. It added a whole dimension for me.

A wonderful evening and a tremendous new look at a beloved story. This music will continue to ring in my ears for a while yet, I think.

Sophie