It’s had rave reviews, notably from men who’ve never read the book. And many female fans who have. But I felt really unsettled by this new production. Last year’s The Witches, wittily inverted Dahl’s misogyny, by making the witches aliens, who disguise themselves as those most ignored of humans – older women. This production actually ends up reinforcing some stereotypes in its attempt to modernise the book, as I’ll explain.
Let me start by declaring: I think the actors especially, Pearl Mackie, are wonderful and I do not blame them one jot for what I’m going to say. The set is fabulous. I am a huge fan of the National Theatre and I respect their right to experiment with new ways of story telling.
I liked the racial diversity. I loved the affectionate joke about Croydon. I loved the few sections where we got to see the joy of 1930s theatre – in the Alice show and the avant garde Midsummer Night’s Dream.
But I felt this production betrayed Ballet Shoes in fundamental ways. It turned a charming and thoughtful story about women and girls achieving in elite art forms into a camp pantomime.
A book that is unashamedly about a world of women without men, and what does the director do? Mock ballet with galumphing, mustachioed men in tutus and give two key female parts – of the ballet madames – to a man. Unforgivable.
And Pauline, played as a young black woman, is made to act physically aggressive – attacking other girls from the very start. None of this is in the book. And the worst racist stereotype so often imposed on black women, is actually imposed right here.
While the subtly lesbian academic couple are turned into a lone bereaved Doctor Jakes; thus actually putting the trope of the “dead lesbian” into Ballet Shoes, where it was not, while imposing a heterosexual patriarchal romance on Sylvia. And Nana is implied to be a Christian fundamentalist who comes to accept “lesbians” – the word spoken with great shock relish. How much more powerful to have left the theme as it was, implicit, as it would have been in that age, rather than lasciviously signposted, prompting the 7+ age rating.
The melancholy of the book was that we saw something every woman knows: the sadness of an older generation of women who’d lost so much, or been limited by the restrictions of their age, but who championed these children, equipping them with education and hopes that they might do better. That’s what women do for the next generation. Sylvia found no romance. We watch her age from young woman to grey haired careworn spinster over the course of the novel. Though we might hope she finds romance in that land of reinvention, California. The idea that these children’s dreams are enabled by these older women is what makes their success so moving. That Pauline’s success comes partly because she was lucky enough to be beautiful. And she knows it too. Why hide that bittersweet truth? Any way it’s a book I care about deeply.
So here’s the episode I did on it for Janet Ellis’s ace Twice Upon a Time podcast..
Read Streatfeild’s original novel, The Whicharts. The girls are waspish snobs, have boyfriends, and plan to entice rich men to marry them. She claimed Ballet Shoes “flowed from her pen”. All she did was make an earlier story suitable for children. And a generation of readers dreamed of making it in a world that had disappeared – laws around child performers became far more restrictive.
Interesting points Samira. I’m so sorry to read this. I was a poor reader as a child but Ballet Shoes was the one that eventually fired my imagination.
It was MY childhood novel. I know theatre has to reflect ourselves and make each generation react differently, and of course being in new audiences, but it does seem that this production has just tried (and tinkered) too much. I haven’t yet booked. Not sure I shall now.
Hey Nicky,
I tried to make clear what I did enjoy. But my unease was overwhelming. Why should Ballet Shoes need an age advisory warning? The book means too much to too many women and girls to be so disrespected.
Hear, hear Samira!
Thanks to your wonderfully insightful article, I for one will not be investing my mearge BBC freelancers pension in attending this debacle.
It’s rare these days to find competent theatre critics, such as yourself, that agree with my brave and controversial opinion that adaptations should be a facsimlie of the original literary work.
Here’s hoping a producer sees your article and perhaps before long you might have your own show – think Louis Thearoux, but instead of weird weekends, Arts Weekends.
Sean Jeremy
Tunbridge Wells
So you’re saying it’s nothing like the original book? But you should know by now that wokerie knows no bounds and will interfere, modernise and radically alter any work of art to get its virtue-signalling messages across. So you’re happy for, say, Matthew Bourne to stage a version of Swan Lake with male dancers in codpieces, but you don’t want males in this hallowed classic? You can’t have it both ways in the woke artistic world, you have to be like the man in the toll booth…you have to accept change!
You’ve absolutely clarified for me, my own misgivings about this production. I’m also deeply miffed that they didn’t end with “If other girls had to be one of us, which of us they’d choose to be?”