If you see one show this Christmas season, make it the exuberant, lovable Ballet Shoes at the National Theatre

Although the name Ballet Shoes might conjure up visions of pastel pink sweetness, there’s nothing overly sugary about the National Theatre’s gorgeous, gutsy family Christmas show. Fans of Noel Streatfeild’s 1936 book of the same name will already know it as an ahead-of-its-time story of a family defined by shared love and economic struggle, not biology. But here, director Katy Rudd steers this tale into the present day, exposing the sinewy tensions underneath this much-loved tale.

We open, startlingly, with a lecture on dinosaurs. “Ninety nine per cent of everything that has ever lived has gone extinct,” says great uncle Matthew (Justin Salinger), a fossil-hunter who adopts three girls called Pauline (Grace Saif), Petrova (Yanexi Enriquez) and Posy (Daisy Sequerra) that he finds on his travels – then he vanishes in the service of science, leaving them with a Darwinian fight for survival on their hands. They’re cared for by the floridly Christian but hilariously pragmatic housekeeper Nana (Jenny Galloway) and big sister figure Sylvia (Pearl Mackie) as they try to earn their keep, and hold their found family together.

Award-winning Australian playwright Kendall Feaver’s ingenious adaptation holds to the structure and characters that made the original book so popular with generations of children, while heightening its tensions and embellishing it with punchy gestures to the present day. “This isn’t a school, it’s a cult,” says bolshy Pauline as she and her sisters begin their dramatic training at an institution presided over by the exacting Russian ballet teacher Madame Fidolia (Salinger again, dragged up as another complicated parental figure).

Here, Pauline is scrappier and more perennially discontented then her softer counterpart in the book. Only the discovery of her acting talents smooths her rough edges, in lessons from lodger Doctor Jakes (Helena Lymbery) who’s now an overt lesbian rather than an implied one. Posy is just as infuriatingly self-absorbed as she aspires to live up to the ballerina mother she never met, but there’s more of her pain and vulnerability here, too. And bluff aspiring aviator Petrova is given a lovely friendship with a new character, South Asian chauffeur Jai (Sid Sagar), who teaches her to drive a car at 13 – somewhat prematurely even in the fearless 1930s.

Jai’s supportive presence is a gentle counter to the colonial undertones of Streatfeild’s story: “The things I find go to my house on the Cromwell Road,” says Uncle Matthew, who blithely assumes he can take for himself anything from rare fossils to human children. He’s lovable, but ultimately irrelevant as a set of lizard bones in the vibrant, living and breathing household he accidentally creates, full of girls who continually vow to be known for their own actions – not those of their grandfathers.

Rudd’s production lavishes parental care on each and every scene here. A chorus of dancers in teal tutus flood the auditorium at the start of the show to teach kids ballet moves, then dress up in different costumes to create the world of the play in richly detailed, dreamlike style. The dancing is exaggerated, wobbly, set to Asaf Zohar’s spirited and strange score. We get a burst of classic ballet wonder courtesy of Madame Fidolia’s poignant encounter with her younger self (ballerina Xolisweh Ana Richards) in a meticulously realised scene that references another NT hit, the wistful classic musical Follies.

Ballet Shoes is as delicately balanced as a dancer en pointe as it leaps between its period setting and the present, finding ways to diversify and complexify this story in ways that never feel lazy or jarring. It’s a Christmas treat for every possible kind of family – as long as they feel the pull of the theatre even a fraction as much as these stage-obsessed sisters.

‘Ballet Shoes’ is on at The National Theatre until 22 February 2025; more information and tickets here.