He knew that the mines had closed, but what shocked him was that nearly every sign of the old way of life had disappeared. It wasn't until I'd failed to write the big important play that I started thinking about my childhood." When he returned to Newcastlea few years later, his father drove him through the old pit villages. "I wanted to write some big political play and I thought I'd hang out in New York. But the general hegenomy tells you the palaces of culture are elsewhere."Īfter university, he went to the US. "Theatre was a place of resistance and criticism in the north-east as well as celebration. It was only when he went to Cambridge university and saw how stultifying the arts were there that he realised he'd been at the hub of something truly invigorating. It's unthinkable now!" He didn't have a clue how artistically rich Tyneside was then. "The job description of the youth leader at the theatre was to politicise young people. Nor did they understand why, with all those brains, he was desperate to be a writer rather than an accountant – just as Billy's family couldn't cope with the idea of him being a ballet dancer.īack then, in the early 1980s, he was involved with local theatre, updating Brecht's Fear and Misery of the Third Reich for Thatcherite times. His parents didn't understand why he would want to go to university, let alone Cambridge. Hall was a clever boy from a working-class family. "Quite often in that strike year, if Dad had a job in, say, Yorkshire, he would be turned back because they'd hear the Geordie accent and think he was a flying picket." Although his father was a self-employed carpet cleaner (until he had a heart attack at 40), he was still affected by Thatcher's assault on the miners. Hall, 47, grew up in the ship-building heart of Tyneside. Democracy in action." He enjoys that story. Only three people voted against playing it and they walked out – the other 1,500 people sang along. The cast rebelled and stopped the show and put it to the vote.
I refused, as did director Stephen Daldry, but in our absence they tried to force the cast not to do it. They were asking permission to cut the Thatcher's Dead song out of 'respect'. I was on the beach and some geezer came along and said, 'There's a call from London!' Somehow the producers had tracked me down. Thirty years on from the miners' strike, on a quiet afternoon in the theatre bar, writer Lee Hall is recalling the pressure to remove the song from the show after the former PM died. The astonishing thing is that the musical, with tunes provided by the not notably radical Elton John, has been a worldwide success, and has played at London's Victoria Palace for nine years. The great experiment of socialism in a democracy depends on you"), it also pre-empts the passing of Margaret Thatcher with a feelgood singalong: "We all sing together in one breath/ Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher/ We all celebrate today/ 'Cause it's one day closer to your death." Not only does it open with Labour MP Herbert Morrison's paean to the newly nationalised mines and common ownership ("Now I want you men of the pits to come through.
#Billy elliot wiki movie#
Forget the movie – this is incendiary drama, militant to its core. I 'm watching Billy Elliot the Musical in a state of shock.
0 kommentar(er)
