Noel Streatfeild’s classic 1936 novel about three adopted sisters who go to stage school is underpinned by spiky subject matter, in the tradition of all good children’s stories, perhaps.
Young Pauline (Grace Saif) is salvaged from a shipwreck, Petrova (Yanexi Enriquez) is orphaned in Russia, and Posy (Daisy Sequerra) is given up by her dancer mother who has “no time for babies”. So they are taken in by professor and palaeontologist, Great Uncle Matthew (Justin Salinger), or GUM for short, who promptly hands them over to two female charges at 999 Cromwell Road and departs for adventures abroad: the “pram in the hallway” is clearly no hindrance for him.
The sisters have their own adventures but they are still three abandoned children who encounter poverty and work woes well before their time, although the larky, can-do tone of Streatfeild’s story refuses to sink into darkness.
This version by Kendall Feaver does much the same, although there is girlhood angst and crabbiness between the sisters. But there is great spirit, gumption and joy too as they find their respective places in the world: Pauline discovers a talent for acting, Petrova for mechanics and Posy for dance.
Under the direction of Katy Rudd, this is an exquisite Christmas cracker of a show, albeit an elegant one that never quite let its hair down, but still it is filled with spectacular theatricality and fabulous performances all round.
Samuel Wyer’s costumes dazzle and Frankie Bradshaw’s set is no less than luminous with GUM’s ancient exhibits in glass cases spiralling upwards, across the house’s storeys, while Ash J Woodward’s video projections and Paule Constable’s lighting create the almost magical effect of movement: dinosaurs lurch and sea waves swish across the stage.
Scene changes have extraordinary fluidity too. Fantasies or flashbacks are conjured as if from a puff of smoke, the change coming in ingenious, instantaneous ways. The reel of a full, remembered, life in the mind of Posy’s Russian dance tutor, Madame Fidolia (brilliantly played by Salinger) is just magnificent in its pensive beauty.
The household is conjured as a warm matriarchy, the girls led by GUM’s great-niece Sylvia (Pearl Mackie), and Nana (Jenny Galloway), and with their lodgers they become an eccentric, non-nuclear family that liberates the girls rather than hemming them in.
There are quietly moving moments around the girls’ insecurity and growing pains that make it feel less like a children’s story, perhaps a little too sedate and emotionally complicated, and more a story for preteens. Rudd’s last children’s show, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, featured a boy escaping from family difficulties into fantasy. Although this story contains no monsters nor the same sprawling imagination, the girls are nonetheless looking for escape. It is the fantasy life of the stage that propels them to discover their vocations in life.
Lessons around resilience in straitened times are woven in, not patronisingly, and remind both children and adults what is most important in life: to keep hold of your passions, and to have confidence in yourself.
The girls are surrounded by interwar, unmarried women who have gone it alone to build impressive lives including lesbian lodger Dr Jakes (Helena Lymbery) and dance tutor, Theo, although like the 2007 film, this version shoehorns in a romance and marriage at the end.
The old-style, big-band music, composed by Asaf Zohar, captures a bygone time and Ellen Kane’s precious choreography captures the gorgeousness of a silver-screen musical. But it would be a mistake to see this story as an old-fashioned one: non-domestic, independent femininity lies at heart, still refreshingly bold today.
