We spoke with Ballet Shoes Playwright Kendall Feaver about her experience developing Noel Streatfeild's beloved novel for stage and her journey into becoming a Playwright.
Ballet Shoes is a much-loved novel and many of the audiences attending are intergenerational, sharing their love and memories of the original novel. What made you want to develop Ballet Shoes and what do you think makes it relevant to modern audiences?
Ballet Shoes has always felt like a story passed down — grandmother to mother to daughter — and I wanted this adaptation to feel the same: precious, shared, and welcoming. Something for families, for date nights, or for anyone taking a punt — and a chance for the fathers and sons who’ve been dragged along to discover why it’s so special. Truly, a show for everyone.
I first read the novel when I was about eight. My grandma gave me a dollar coin to spend in a charity shop in Wellington, NSW, and I came home with a battered but completely lovely copy. I read it to pieces. Opening it felt like stepping through a portal into a magical world — and what thrilled me most was that the world was real: the theatre.
What struck me even then was that it didn’t pretend theatre was easy. It could be a calling, something deeply held and wonderful — but it was also graft, years of training, and plenty of disappointment. Noel Streatfeild was a pioneer in that respect: not just of the career novel for girls, but in grounding the fantasy of wish-fulfilment in something tangible — the rehearsal rooms, the greasepaint, even the paperwork.
The set-up feels almost like a fairytale: three orphaned girls with no clear past, growing up in a messy, loving, mostly female boarding house and a slightly faded performing arts school. But the obstacles are entirely real — money, access, self-belief — the everyday business of trying to build a life and make something creative possible. Which is exactly why it still feels so current. The barriers haven’t changed much. And yet, in this story, the girls are taken seriously. Their ambitions are encouraged. That kind of steady, matter-of-fact support — adults simply saying “yes, you can do this” — still feels quietly radical.
And all of it unfolds in a house full of dinosaur bones and fossils — paleontology, theatre, cars, planes and ballet all jumbled together. It suggests that creativity sits alongside curiosity about everything else, that art isn’t separate from life but woven into it — part of history, part of learning, simply part of being human. That felt magical to me then. Now it feels not just magical, but necessary.
Which character from the play do you most identify with?
All three! I share Pauline’s love of language and digging into text — which, wonderfully, became my job. I recognise Petrova’s feeling of being slightly out of place, and her curiosity about how things work. And I admire Posy’s drive and ambition, though I have none of her dancing talent. In fact, I was kicked out of ballet at four for trying to teach the class — which probably tells you everything.
One of the most exciting things about the National is that we are the largest factory in central London. As a result, we have a hugely talented team who work on our shows. What excited you most about working with them and the range of skills and facilities we have to offer creatives working on our shows?
The Studio at the National Theatre is one of my favourite places in the world. It’s where early drafts are tested, broken open, rebuilt and tested again — which is where theatre really lives: on its feet, in the hands and mouths of actors, not lying flat on a page.
Every department is full of quiet brilliance — Lighting, Sound, Costume, Wardrobe, Props, Stage, Automation, Wigs, Hair and Makeup, Music and more. For an extrovert like me, stuck in what is essentially a very solitary job, it’s a gift. Some weeks the only person I speak to is my Uber Eats driver, so I treasure every interaction — from the warm hello at Stage Door to security gently telling me it’s time to leave the bar.
One day I took a wrong turn and wandered into a room of impossibly beautiful hand-painted fabrics for Ballet Shoes, designed by Sam Wyer and realised by the textiles team, and I just sat down and cried. You spend years writing a play mostly alone, poking at it in your pyjamas, and then suddenly hundreds of wildly skilled people are building it for real. It’s joyful and a little terrifying — think about it too much and you’d drown in the responsibility.
But when you’re working with collaborators you trust — like Katy Rudd, Frankie Bradshaw, and Sam — you get to relax into something better: the knowledge that your ideas and big ambitions (and slightly unhinged Spotify playlists and Pinterest boards) won’t just be realised, but transformed into something far richer than you could ever make on your own.
The heart of the NT Bookshop is our playwall. If we could ask you to recommend a playtext that had an impact on you, which would it be?
Angels in America by Tony Kushner is probably a common answer — but it’s still my favourite. Its scope is extraordinary: intimate and epic at once. It takes apart a time and place and, to loosely paraphrase Kushner’s talking Mormon mannequin, exposes its guts, then somehow stitches it back together — puckered seams, scars still showing. And I love its sheer audacity: instead of using heaven as metaphor, it sends its characters there, literally, to wrestle with angels and God. Every time I read it, I find something new.
I also adore In the Next Room or The Vibrator Play by Sarah Ruhl — it’s so witty and humane, full of science, wonder, silliness, sadness and tenderness, often all at once.
And I’ll see anything by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. If his name’s on it, I’m buying a ticket.
Many of our customers are aspiring playwrights. Can you tell us a little about your journey and if you have any tips and tricks for those young creatives hoping to break through?
I decided quite young that I wanted to be a playwright because I loved telling stories and making people laugh — and I wasn’t entirely convinced I had the stamina for a novel.
I read constantly. I made scrappy shows at uni while the theatre was free to hire. Then I made fringe shows and lost money. I didn’t get into the only playwriting degree in Australia. I tried again in London. I made coffee, worked box office, project-managed events — whatever paid the rent — and wrote at night and on weekends.
In 2015, my friends staged a gentle intervention and suggested I spend less time being miserable about not being a playwright and more time actually finishing one of my many half-started ideas. So I did. I sent it to the Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting in Manchester, and that small, practical act genuinely changed my life.
The biggest thing I’ve learned is deeply unromantic: finish the draft. Even if no one’s asking for it. A full-length script is proof — of the work, of your voice, of your potential. The first draft only has to exist. The tenth or twentieth might be the one that opens a door. But none of that happens if you don’t get to the end.
And also: build a life outside theatre. Theatre can’t love you back. People can. Living a bit will make you a much better writer anyway.
