FEARED IT MIGHT BE TUTU MUCH, BUT NO…
I immediately fell for Frankie Bradshaw’s set: a two- storey house lined with fossil skeletons in cases, and a spirited opening in which the prime mover – Great Uncle Matthew – lectures on their wonders and then in rapid successiom suffers graphic shipwreck, abseiling disaster and an earthquake, all the while picking up spare infants. Justin Salinger is magnificent in plus-fours , before turning into a massively furred and velveted cod-Russian Madame at the ballet school. DirectorKaty Rudd keeps it moving and in no time the focus is on the three adopted babies grown into girls being removed from school for brawling (in the book it was mere poverty, but modern kids need lairy role models). They resolve to invent their own surname: Fossil, and aim to make it famousl
After the glorious WITCHES last year I had some qualms about what the NT would serve up as this year’s Christmas family treat. Especially as it is based on Noel Streatfield’s earnest 1936 romance about three girls adopted from varius disasters by a flaky palaeontologist and left to be raised by his housekeeper,teenage great-niece Sylvia and assorted lodgers, one of whom gets them into stage school so they can support the household from age 12 on hardearned shillings . Pauline, Petrova and Posy have fascinated little girls for decades – one first loving to act, one almost psychopathically focused on ballet, the third longing only to be a motor mechanic, . But for all its insight into child actors in the 30s, today the book feels both farfetched and (whispering bravely) a bit of a fossil.
But Kendall Feaver has tweaked it, dealing robustly with adjustments of tone for an age less tolerant of friendly random adults mentoring young girls. The girls are less obediently subservient to gruelling routines, and ruder to adults, than the 1930s tolerated. Grace Saif, Yanexi Enriquez and Daisy Sequerra are fun, adults but very convincing as young teens; Jenny Galloway, in a big grey shawl and apron, is an entertaining Nana and Pearl Mackie as Sylvia – “Garnie” – gets a romantic plot as Mr and Mrs Simpson become the single Jai Saran, whose irreproachably teaches Petrova car maintenance but in a chaotic tango (the dancing is great) finally woos Sylvia. Rather than two lady academics we now have just one, Helena Lymbery magnificently donnish as a bereaved and scorned lesbian, another example the girls of making your own brave unashamed future.”Depression is the malady of the narcissist” she says sternly, a useful message at any age.
It is enjoyable, mostly in a slightly restrained way, but its strengths are in the messages of optimism through hard work and in the dance interludes: most beautifully in the second half a ballet of Madame Fidolia’s youth, Bolshoi triumphs and loss first through revolution and then old age: it’s genuinely moving and beautiful. The other dances are lively, good in character, Ellen Kane as choreographer and an 18-piece orchestra. For me a favourite moment was when the girls are hired for a progressive, 1930’s modernist Midsummer Night’s Dream, dressed in surreal space-age tinfoil and doing robotic movements under a pretentious director. A cracking bit of flying, too, right over the front rows. And I am happy to say that Salinger returns not only as the elusive Great-Uncle Matthew but, fleetingly, as yet another queenly old Russian ballet mistress.
nationaltheatre.org.uk to 22 feb
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