Growing up in the North East of England in the early 1980s was a very mixed experience. My abiding memory of my first year of secondary school in 1979, was the teachers faces the day after Margaret Thatcher was elected Prime Minister. There was a real sense of despondency, which I did not understand. But for the next ten years, the legacy of that day made an indelible stamp on my childhood. On TV, we heard of exotic characters, such as Yuppies who worked in ‘The City’ who did deals on mobile phones, whilst quaffing champagne, but in the North East, it felt like we were somehow under siege. Unemployment was exploding, Thatcher seemed to attack everything that the North East was most proud of: its industrial heritage, its sense of a common purpose, even the robust humour seemed to be under attack from the middle class snobbishness, which she represented. All of the images, which made sense of this seem to hark back 50 years to the 1930s, of two nations divided not only by prosperity, but by a way of looking at the world. Things seem to hit crisis point in 1984, when the Miners’ Strike focused all of these issues. Living in the North East where coal mining had been the lifeblood of the economy and a certain way of life for hundreds of years, this seemed less like an industrial fracas and more akin to a civil war. Quite quickly, the police were donning riot shields and pitch battles were taking place between the shabby pickets, who met the full might of the State. Whichever side you were on, no lives in the North East went untouched by the events of that desperate year. But for me personally, the 1980s were not bleak. I was a young teenager discovering all the things I would pursue for the rest of my life. I discovered poetry in the bowels of Newcastle Central Library, I bought secondhand Elton John LPs, at the Handyside arcade, played in bands, joined the local drama groups and dreamt of living a creative life. Even though I knew this was probably an unattainable dream. Up until that point, I had always assumed I would go to work with my dad, cleaning carpets, and had no idea that I might actually be able to do something different. But with the encouragement of a group of the enlightened teachers who had been so despondent in May 1979, I was encouraged to find another way. As I wanted to be a writer, I decided I needed to go somewhere that writers went and so I set my heart on going to Cambridge. And like the Royal Ballet School for Billy Elliot, it became my idea of salvation. Despite many odds, I proceeded to get in, but when I was there, I realised that Cambridge was not necessarily the answer and that what was most important about being creative, what was richest and most inspiring, I had already discovered in Newcastle. Cambridge was a great experience but I realised everything important about my creative life was formed in my bedroom in Newcastle and so, on leaving University, I set about writing a series of plays which explored this in ways which were more or less autobiographical. Billy Elliott is one of the less autobiographical pieces. I have “two left feet” as they say in Newcastle. But the basic premise of a young boy discovering a new world of creativity, against the background of the harsh realities of the 1980s, was a world I felt very familiar with. I assumed that this subject matter would be of very limited interest. Ballet as I knew “was for poofs”, films about kids growing up in the North of England were something that we’d got bored of after the film Kes in 1970. So, I was amazed when my friend Stephen Daldry, who was a theatre director of some eminence, asked to read the script and then declared he would direct it. I think right from the word go, he saw something that I had not seen, as it was too close to my own concerns. He saw that the story was almost a myth or a fairy tale, that once the dancing and music were committed to film it would become almost like a musical. Elton John was at the very first public performance of the film in Cannes and I heard it had sent him home in floods of tears. I was amazed that one of my musical heroes had even seen a bit of my work, let alone liked it, and I was even more surprised when a couple of months later I was in New York having supper and discussing the possibility of making a musical of the film. Elton was passionate that the story could work as a musical. What amazed me even more was that Elton insisted that I should write the lyrics to the songs. I was thrilled but also incredibly nervous. The whole project only seemed possible if the original creative team on the movie would commit to being involved. They all committed and I set about writing the songs with Elton. We had an immediate rapport, starting with the first song, and I just kept going till the end. Elton’s music surprised me. Somehow he managed to tap into all sorts of traditions of songs that had huge resonance with the working class culture I was writing about. Hymns, the songs of male voice choirs, folk songs, the kind of rock ‘n’ roll beloved of working men’s clubs were all flooding out. I realise that what we were creating was a form of musical that had a particularly British heritage, going back to music hall, Ewan McColl‘s work with the Unity Theatre, Joan Littlewood’s famous productions at Stratford East, which lead on to Lionel Bart emerging to produce Oliver. It was a tradition which I had seen in the work of the 7:84 Theatre Company in the 1980s – where song, folk dance, politics and gritty humour all came together in the proud working-class tradition of ‘a good night out’. Although we never discussed any of this consciously, Elton had understood that tradition and had thrown down the gauntlet to the rest of us, to create a musical that was truly British, that would be rough, lyrical, funny, and moving in equal measure. But however good it looked on paper and however good the songs sounded on Elton’s demo, the show depends entirely on finding someone to play Billy Elliot. Not only did we need one Billy Elliot but we needed three at any one time. It seemed like an impossible challenge. It took a couple of years to troll through every dance school in the country, but to my amazement, we found a group of boys who surpassed my hopes. The strangest thing was ADAPTATION By Lee Hall 10
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