Livre d'Or

My extremely awesome girlfriend managed to get us tickets for the stage production of Ballet Shoes, a book we both imprinted on. Which meant we actually managed to do the thing I'm always hoping for of a proper date-date Friday night on a weekend when I'm doing community work Saturday.

I stayed in my lovely flat after class, which is really simplifying everything compared to last year when I was staying in people's spare rooms and had to clear out Thursday morning. ghoti_mhic_uait has some slightly awkward dietary restrictions at the moment, so with the timing of getting across London we ended up grabbing a rushed supper in Leon by Waterloo.

The play itself was really worth seeing! I was nervous I'd end up disappointed with any adaptation of a childhood favourite, but it was very much in the spirit of the book. The scenery was amazing, absolutely lovely representation of a cluttered collector's home. And it was really well cast. Not unusually for the National, the cast were much more visibly ethnically diverse than the audience; they'd clearly chosen the best actors for the roles rather than the ones who look like people's expectation of Edwardian children's books, and then slightly altered the script to fit the appearances of the actors. Since the whole point of the story is that the sisters aren't biologically related, it made perfect sense for them to come from various backgrounds. Mr Simpson is played by an Asian actor, so he becomes Mr Saran, an explicitly Asian character. Theo Dane's actor is Black, so she is played as an American expat with a Southern accent. They also had the same, male, actor doubling as GUM and Madame, which was really well done and not at all laughing at him for effectively a drag role. Lots of male chorus members also played girls in the female-dominated crowd scenes.

I was really impressed with how well the three sisters acted the part of starting out as untrained actors and dancers gradually learning their craft over the course of the play! It's tricky for a good actor to pretend to be a bad actor. The three sisters are played by adults, which sort of relates to comments in the book where under 12s can't really play major professional roles, whereas nowadays it's pretty unusual for even teenagers to play 13 and 15yos. So you had to suspend disbelief a bit to think that these obvious adults were 11, 13 and 15, but it was pretty well done.

Generally they stuck pretty closely to the book, but adapted it sensibly to be a play rather than exactly following the original. They slightly changed the ending, but in a way that makes if anything more sense than how it goes in the book, and with fundamentally the same outcome. They make Dr Jakes explicitly a lesbian, inserting a dialogue with Pauline about the topic and using words like lesbian, sapphic and even Queer which felt a little anachronistic. But they do this at the expense of killing off Dr Smith, which I'm a bit sad about. I mean, nice to make the subtextual lesbian rep not so sub, but they book gives us a happy relationship, not a tragic widow. I was less sad about Mr Saran being single and available to romance Sylvie; why not? In fact Sylvie is much more of a character than in the books, with quite a bit of emphasis on the fact that she herself was an orphan adopted by GUM and not much older than the girls she ends up as the guardian for. That's partly because I relate more to the adult characters now that I'm older than most of them rather than a child reader, but I think it was also a shift in emphasis by the stage production. One change I did not like was that they ruined Winnifred's character, making her annoying and mannered rather than highly competent but not rich or pretty enough to get lead roles.

One thing I loved was that they actually show you scenes from the excessively modern Midsummer Night's Dream where the sisters play fairies, and it's gorgeous! Not at all how I imagined it, but absolutely perfect early 20th century avant garde. There were also some fairly cliched, but very nicely done, scenes from the point of view of Madame remembering her youth in imperial and then revolutionary Russia. We had to look up when the book was actually published; I had vaguely placed it as shortly after WW2, and ghoti_mhic_uait as a few years earlier than the real date of 1936. It actually does rather matter when it's set, even though its focus is really local. It's very much in the shadow of WW1 and the character of Madame as a Russian exile makes really good chronological sense.

We also had a really interesting discussion about how we related to the book when we were the target age for it, particularly in terms of how we read Petrova the tomboy. Neither of us was at all a tomboy but we weren't girly girls either. I thought that Petrova was the character you were obviously supposed to relate to, and it didn't worry me that much that her gender presentation was a bit different from mine. K felt more alienated by the implication that gender non-conforming girls have to be interested in cars and aeroplanes rather than dance and theatre.

Anyway, we managed to catch the last show of the run, but apparently there is going to be a reprise later in the year, so if this review makes you want to see it you still have a chance!

The reason it made sense to go to the theatre was that Saturday I was working at Mosaic Liberal in North London. The rabbi there is a recent graduate so I know her quite well; she warned me that things could get a bit politically fraught around news coming from Israel. This is an ongoing issue since October 7th 2023, but it was particularly acute this week as we've just learned that the baby and toddler sibling Israeli hostages were killed along with their mother. Fundamentally the issue is not that our (Progressive) communities have a lot of militant Zionists, but that many many British Jews have direct personal connections with Israelis including those murdered in the initial attack, the hostage families, and others. But we rarely have direct personal connections with any Palestinians. So there can be conflict between people who just don't want to hear anything sympathetic to the Palestinians as it seems callous when people they know directly are suffering because of Hamas' actions, and people who think it's unjust to care more about the suffering of Israelis than the much larger numbers of victims and bereaved who are Palestinian.

So I did a lot of acknowledging the emotions in the room, and gave a sermon about how it's wrong to kill the innocent even during a war situation, and reminded people of our core Progressive Jewish values of social justice. Also made sure to use a version of the prayer for Israel that explicitly asks God to protect Palestinians. I think I handled this ok; I got the impression that people with a range of different political stances felt heard and cared for, and nobody got angry with me for being insufficiently partisan or too partisan in one direction or the other. Nor for trying to avoid the issue that is on everybody's minds because it's too political and difficult to talk about.

The annoying thing is that the community somehow managed to lose (quite likely accidentally tidy up or take home) my tallit. I put it in a safe place for five minutes while we went to make Kiddush, the ritual sharing of food that happens after the service, with the other two communities who share the same building, but when I came back to fetch it it was gone. They are trying to retrieve it for me and hopefully that will work out, but it's a big nuisance!