thesis statements billy elliot

Billy Elliot

By stephen daldry, billy elliot quotes and analysis.

"Just because I like ballet don't mean I'm a poof, you know." Billy Elliot

Billy is well aware of the stereotype that people see when they see male ballet dancers. Men like his father and the kids he is at school with believe that his love of ballet is symbolic of his sexuality. In this instance, his friend Michael (who is gay) also seems to believe there's a correlation between his interest in ballet and his sexuality, but with this quote, Billy insists that there is not.

Sandra: This'll sound strange, Billy, but for some time now I've been thinkin' of the Royal Ballet School. Billy: Aren't you a bit old, Miss? Sandra: No, not me... you! I'm the bloody teacher. Sandra and Billy

Mrs. Wilkinson introduces Billy to dancing in general and ballet in particular, and she realizes very quickly that he is her most talented student. She knows that he is talented enough to at least audition for the Royal Ballet School, but knows that it will sound strange to Billy, and to anyone else, that a boy from a mining family should pursue a calling to dance at the highest level. This comic exchange marks the first suggestion that Billy take his craft more seriously and pursue dance with passion and focus. It also shows the wry irreverent tone of both Billy and Sandra.

Grandma: I used to go to ballet. Billy: See? Jackie: All right for your Nana. For girls. No, not for lads, Billy. Lads do football...or boxing...or wrestling. Not friggin' ballet. Billy, Jackie, Grandma

Billy is triumphant when his grandmother tells his father that she used to take ballet classes. He feels that it validates his interest, but Jackie sees Grandma's dancing aspirations as proof that ballet is for girls and not for boys. This exchange marks the fact that Billy and others believe in his talent, while Jackie does not.

"Sorta feels good. Sorta stiff and that, but once I get going... then I like, forget everything. And... sorta disappear. Sorta disappear. Like I feel a change in my whole body. And I've got this fire in my body. I'm just there. Flyin' like a bird. Like electricity. Yeah, like electricity." Billy

At the end of his audition, when it seems like things have not gone very well for Billy, a judge asks him what it feels like when he dances. Billy says this as his response. It is an unformed, un-pre-meditated, and raw account of his emotional experience of dance. The descriptors he uses show the judges (and the viewer) that Billy has a deeply felt passion for his discipline, that it is something intrinsic to his very being.

Billy: I think I'm scared, Dad. Jackie: That's okay, son. We're all scared. Billy: Well... if I don't like it, can I still come back? Jackie: Are you kidding? We've let out your room. Billy and Jackie

Just before Billy goes to ballet school, he and his father visit his mother's grave, and Billy expresses his reservations about going away to school. While he is very passionate about dance, he knows that going to a fancy dance school in London will be a huge culture shock and will change the course of his life. Affectionately, his father jokes that he has no choice but to stay at the school, since he's going to be renting his room.

Billy: So what about your mother? Does she have sex? Debbie: No, she's unfulfilled. That's why she dances. Billy: She dances instead of sex? Your family's weird! Billy & Debbie

Debbie, Sandra's daughter, tells Billy that her mother is unfulfilled in her marriage to her father, which is why she is so passionate about dance. In this moment we learn more about Sandra, and the fact that she is such a good teacher in part because she is making up for other parts of her life that are not so good.

"You're a ballet dancer, then let's be havin' it!" Tony

When Sandra goes to the Elliots' house to confront them about the fact that Billy missed his audition, Tony is indignant about his brother's interest, bullying his brother for his secret girly passion. He tells Billy to get on the table and dance to prove to them that he's a dancer. This moment epitomizes the aggressive and bullying disposition of Billy's older brother, Tony.

Sandra : She must've been a very special woman, your mother. Billy : No she was just me mam. Sandra and Billy

In this exchange, Sandra tries to sentimentalize her sympathy for Billy's loss of his mother. She tries to soften the fact of the loss by suggesting that his mother was special, but Billy takes a more straightforward approach, insisting that she wasn't special, she was just his mother. His candor suggests that his mother doesn't need to have been special for him to miss her.

"I'm going to let Mrs. Wilkinson use the bottom end of the boxing hall for her ballet lessons. So no hanky-panky, understood?" George, the boxing instructor

As George tells the boxers that Sandra is going to be using the gym for ballet, this marks the first point at which Billy sees the ballet class. This simple shared use of space, remarked upon casually by George, marks the beginning of a major shift in Billy's life.

Billy: Tony, do you ever think about death? Tony: Fuck off. Billy and Tony

Early on in the film, Billy tries to connect with his brother about the loss of their mother, but Tony has no interest, telling his younger brother to "fuck off." This shows that Tony has a bullying temperament, and that Billy is lonely in his own family.

Billy Elliot Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Billy Elliot is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

“Lads do football…or boxing…or wrestling. Not friggin’ ballet.” How does the film challenge the traditional notions of masculinity and femininity?

This movie takes place a long time before Harry Styles donned a dress and looked "way cool".

Gender is at the center of Billy's problems, even though he sees no issue with his interest in ballet. In the town where he is from, boxing is for boys...

Does Mrs. Wilkinson want Billy to come to boxing class next week?

Chapter please?

How does Billy Elliot portray the theme of being masculine?

Gender and masulinity is are at the center of Billy's problems, even though he sees no issue with his interest in ballet. In the town where he is from, boxing is for boys and ballet for girls, yet Billy's deep love for dance draws him towards...

Study Guide for Billy Elliot

Billy Elliot study guide contains a biography of director Stephen Daldry, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Billy Elliot
• Billy Elliot Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Billy Elliot

Billy Elliot essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Billy Elliot, directed by Stephen Daldry.

• Young Men and Their Chosen Paths: Stephen Daldry's film Billy Elliot and Seamus Heaney's poem 'Follower'
• Making History Personal in 'Billy Elliot': Social and Cultural Upward Mobility under Thatcher’s Government
• Human Experiences Can Be Difficult but Transformative: Comparing 'Billy Elliot" and ‘Deng Adut University of Western Sydney Advertisement’

Wikipedia Entries for Billy Elliot

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17 Billy Elliot and Its Lineage: The Politics of Class and Sexual Identity in British Musicals since 1953

Robert Gordon is Professor of Theatre and Performance and Director of the Pinter Centre for Performance and Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London. Publications include essays on post-war British theatre, South African theatre, Shakespeare, Wilde, Pirandello and Stoppard: Text and Performance (1991). His broad experience as actor and director informs the survey of modern acting theory in The Purpose of Playing (2006). Harold Pinter: the Theatre of Power was published in 2012 and his production, Pinter: In Other Rooms, toured to Berlin, Prague, Budapest and Thessaloniki in 2011. In 2012 he directed Kander and Ebb’s Steel Pier in Brno and he is co-editing the Oxford Handbook of the British Musical.

• Published: 10 January 2017
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In the years since 1954, the British musical has in various ways represented the changes that have occurred in social and political attitudes. The camp style of Salad Days and The Boy Friend encodes its critique of the Conservative government’s repressive policies of heteronormative conformity in the early 1950s by exploiting popular traditions of pantomime and music hall performance to valorize an emergent gay sensibility, while the theatre of Joan Littlewood at Stratford East utilized these same popular forms in the construction of a socialist theatre capable of articulating a working-class culture. These two recurrent conceptions of alternative political performance—the subversive queer/camp strategy and the Marxian aesthetic of alternative politics and culture—interact and are combined to startling effect in Billy Elliot , whose dialectical arguments around the relationship between class and gender/sexual orientation, popular and ‘high’ art provide a prime example of British theatre at its most socially aware.

Billy Elliot: The Musical in Its Social and Artistic Contexts

After the experiments in new musico-dramaturgical forms in British musicals from the 1970s to the 1990s, 1   Billy Elliot: The Musical (2005) returns to older forms of popular entertainment in order to evoke a disappearing world of northern working-class culture. Remarkably, the musical sets the tacky showbiz glitz and camp comedy of stage and television variety shows 2 in dialectical opposition to the rude vitality and political directness that typified the ‘rough’ aesthetic of British socialist theatre between the 1950s and the early 1980s to create a synthesis that comprises a new kind of folk aesthetic. Critiquing the rigidly sexist and homophobic paternalism of working-class culture while at the same time lamenting the destruction of the communitarian values that sustained it, the show’s dramaturgical strategies owe as much to the utopian ethos of fifties musical comedies such as The Boy Friend (1953) and Salad Days (1954) as to the revolutionary politics of working-class drama from the seventies.

Without some understanding of its political context, Billy Elliot makes sense only as a version of the well-worn story in which a poor but talented youngster battles to realize his/her dreams of success. Yet this is precisely the way in which the musical has been interpreted by the New York critic John Lahr. Amidst a chorus of approval for the show by London critics after its premiere—and by Broadway reviewers three years later—Lahr’s review of the West End production of Billy Elliot in the New Yorker (July 2005) stands out for its ethnocentric blindness to the distinctively British context that informs the musical:

The British love musicals; they just don’t do them very well. […] The jazz of American optimism, which lends elation and energy to the form, is somehow alien to the ironic British spirit. At its buoyant core, the American musical is the expression of a land of plenty. England, on the other hand, is a land of scarcity—the Land of No, as a friend of mine calls it. 3

Lahr’s refusal to comprehend the specific forms of British entertainment as expressive of a wholly other cultural identity betrays a reflex of American imperialism that neatly inverts the historical posture of British colonial superiority. Nowhere in Lahr’s review is there an acknowledgement that the miners’ eventual capitulation in 1985 was a defining historical moment, symbolizing the Thatcher government’s victory over trade union power and the triumph of monetarist policy. A British audience will, however, be profoundly aware of how the consequent destruction of Britain’s industrial base created an opposition between the devastated mining and manufacturing regions of Wales and the north, and the wealthy south of England, leaving a legacy of class hatred that festered for decades. Paradoxically, Lahr’s condescending critique of Billy Elliot serves merely to underline the deeper cultural differences between British and American musicals too often ignored in their frequent transatlantic crossings:

By nature, the musical genre deals with fantasy, not fact; it is at its most political when it delivers pleasure, not dogmatic persiflage. [Lee] Hall doesn’t seem to understand this, and his prolix, repetitive book quickly loses its way. When the miners are the issue—and their story eats up a fair portion of the saga—the musical stalls; the proletariat here really are lumpen. When Billy dances, however, everything comes alive.

Lahr appears to presume that, as entertainment, the skilful representation of exceptional individuals by gifted performers creates stage magic, whereas the convincing enactment of the mundane lives of workers is simply boring. Articulating the deeply rooted credo of American liberalism, Lahr implies that, rather than unfolding coherent and believable narratives, musicals should provide opportunities for virtuoso performers to demonstrate their special talent: ‘When Billy is doing his twists and twirls, his youthful entrechats and jetés, the immanence of the extraordinary is credible. When he tap-dances, it isn’t; Savion Glover he ain’t.’ 4 Inherent in Lahr’s judgement is the assumption that it is the chief function of the musical to valorize the star system. While it is true that the majority of Broadway musicals celebrate the success of the extraordinary individual both in fact and in fiction, British musicals are usually motivated by more communitarian aims. In sociocultural terms, Billy Elliot is interesting precisely because its dramaturgical structure opposes the capitalist ideology of acquisitive individualism against the collectivist values of social welfare.

The Camp Sensibility in Popular British Entertainment

It is notable that Billy Elliot exploits conventions of drag and camp performance from music hall, pantomime, and end-of-the-pier shows to destabilize patriarchal notions of the biological determination of gender and sexual identity. It is the first British musical to explore the connection between homophobic anxiety and the cultural implications of homosexual orientation within a society that prizes masculine strength as a heroic virtue. By distinguishing between homosexuality and effeminacy and undermining the incorrect assumption that ballet is a profession for women and gay men, the musical has achieved historical significance in being the first mainstream British entertainment to directly interrogate homophobic prejudice as a function of patriarchal society. 5 In doing so Billy Elliot employs a long tradition of camp in British popular culture as a strategy for undermining patriarchal assumptions of gender and sexuality.

A number of British entertainment forms that originated in the nineteenth century exhibited a sensibility that might today be labelled ‘camp’: pantomime, burlesque, farce, music hall (later variety) performance, and end-of-the-pier concerts were characterized by eccentric stage personalities, cross-dressing, parody, and comic drollery that was both deadpan and facetious. Such types of entertainment persisted until the advent of broadcast television transformed many popular kinds of stage entertainment into TV comedy and variety shows 6 in the late fifties. As had been the case with Edwardian music hall stars like Marie Lloyd and George Robey, the biggest stage stars between the 1920s and 1950s, such as Gracie Fields and George Formby, achieved popularity with working- and middle-class audiences alike, perhaps through the success of their films. 7 On the other hand, musical comedy appealed predominantly, if not wholly, to middle- and upper-class audiences, tending to employ singers, dancers, and comic actors trained as theatre performers rather than music hall artistes. 8

The camp sensibility that formed an important component of predominantly working-class types of entertainment was arch and facetious, ridiculing clichés and fetishizing outmoded forms by means of both nostalgia and parody, but during the 1890s the attitude was adopted and elaborated by a queer subculture. Camp’s knowing emphasis on sexual innuendo may well have lent itself to the subversive satire of a queer milieu in which the fixity of gender positions was undermined by unrestricted sexual role-play. The interwar period witnessed the gradual development of a hidden gay subculture in British cities; this was even more pronounced during the war years but repressive policing after 1951 ensured that this bohemian subculture, shared perhaps by artists and theatre people, remained more or less invisible to the bourgeois majority. There was an invented language called Polari by which one insider could recognize another, allowing apparently innocent behaviour to be interpreted in a coded way.

In the mainstream forms of variety, pantomime, revue, cinema, and ‘light entertainment’ programmes on radio and television, the queer potential of camp became progressively more emphatic between the 1950s and the 1980s. A line of queer performers became household names, including Frankie Howerd, Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Larry Grayson, and Julian Clary, while a few much-loved drag performers such as Danny La Rue and Paul O’Grady, aka Lily Savage, were complemented by overtly ‘straight’ male performers who were famous for their varied uses of transvestite performance (e.g. Barry Humphries, aka Dame Edna Everage, Stanley Baxter, and Les Dawson).

Musical Comedy and Camp Since 1953

Although deriving from the more ‘respectable’ middle-class theatre tradition, Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend has a tongue-in-cheek quality that is inherently camp, its charming and nostalgic pastiche of twenties musical comedy making it the first entirely retro musical comedy. 9 Its lack of any genuinely sexual romance heightens the camp effect in which the accurate pastiche of twenties musical comedy empties the original form of any emotional content—perhaps a sign of Sandy Wilson’s queer sensibility. The fact that its love songs deliberately echo popular antecedents renders them de trop : ‘A Room in Bloomsbury’ reproduces the style of Coward’s definitive ‘A Room with A View’ 10 without any of its romantic yearning. The title song lends itself so easily to camp parody:

We’ve got to have, We plot to have; For it’s so dreary not to have, That certain thing called the boy friend. We’re blue without, Can’t do without, Our dreams just won’t come true without, That certain thing called the boy friend.

Here the female chorus sing of the ‘boy friend’ as of any attractive man, a generalized image of a male as sex object, which reverses the usual order of musical comedy courtship in which men pine after women. The potential boy friends somewhat narcissistically collude in the process of being admired:

Life without us Is quite impossible And devoid of all charms, No amount of idle gossip’ll Keep them out of our arms.

In an era when musicals were resolutely hetero-normative, when boy met girl and usually got her after negotiating a number of obstacles, Sandy Wilson’s camp disruption of generic expectations invites a degree of playfulness that might encourage a homosexual man to place himself in the girls’ position of desiring a generic ‘boy friend’. Such a coded reading might have been even more obviously implied in 1953 when most of the West End chorus boys would have been gay and many effeminate, though no doubt the doubleness of the signification, which allowed both ‘straight’ and ‘camp’ readings would have been maintained. 11

In an equally playful though even more absurd vein, the plot of Salad Days (1954) exploits the episodic structure of an intimate revue, 12 thinly disguised as a coming-of-age narrative in which Jane and Timothy, having newly graduated with BA degrees, attempt to find something to do with their lives (‘We Said We Wouldn’t Look Back’). At face value, the wild eccentricity of Salad Days might simply appear charming to most British audiences but its questioning of authority is particularly resonant for those who may have had occasion to fear it. As in revues and pantomimes of the period, the camp innuendo of Salad Days appealed especially to a bohemian class of theatre professionals and closeted homosexuals in the form of ‘in-jokes’.

In Salad Days , Jane’s parents are pressuring her to find a suitable husband and Timothy’s are harassing him to find a proper job (‘Find Yourself Something to Do’) so the two decide to get married without any suggestion of passionate attachment on either side and without any idea how they will earn a living. 13 A series of adventures is initiated through their chance encounter with a tramp in a London park; he asks the couple if they will look after his old portable piano for £7 a week: it is a magic piano that makes anyone who hears it dance (‘Oh Look at Me’). The outbreaks of dancing that interrupt the dialogue a number of times offer an experience of utopian pleasure, joyously shared by the audience.

On the surface a fantastical folk tale, Salad Days metaphorically represents the malaise of young middle-class people in Britain nine years after the war. Expected to follow conservatively in the footsteps of their parents, and lacking any distinct identity as young people, university graduates were trapped in a repressive and puritanical environment that demanded dull but comfortable conformity. The post-war dispensation denied young people the pleasure that in different ways characterized the romantic escapism of personal relationships during the war and the more subversive hedonism of the rock ’n’ roll culture of Teddy boys and teenagers soon to come.

The startling transformation by the magic piano of a most unlikely assortment of individuals into dancers prompts a carnivalesque disruption of social convention that promotes gaiety in the old-fashioned sense of the word, but also gestures towards the more modern meaning of ‘being gay’. A scene set in Gusset Creations, the fashionable dress shop frequented by Jane’s mother, features the only obviously homosexual character in Salad Days . While contributing little if anything to the elaboration of the plot, Act 2, Scene 5 presents a dress parade organized by the flamboyantly effeminate fashion designer, Ambrose, that goes horribly wrong, eventually being interrupted by the news that the piano has been lost again. Ambrose’s pretentious attitudes and histrionically exaggerated closing line, ‘I’m drained of all emotions. I’m a husk. Leave me’ (53) reinforces a camp stereotype of the hysterical homosexual. When read ‘against the grain’, 14 this revue-like scene’s tangential connection with the central narrative discloses the absence in the text of any realistic representation of homosexuality—a result of the regime of censorship and police repression being satirized in the show.

It does not require a great leap of the imagination to view the ironically titled Minister of Pleasure and Pastime as a satire on the hypocritical and censorious regime of the Conservative government: while puritanically attempting to put a stop to the subversive gaiety of the magic piano he spends his evenings at the club ‘Cleopatra’. Also very apt as a satirical target is the police officer whose secret passion for all forms of dance expresses itself in an extremely camp and funny scene where he demonstrates his hidden terpsichorean skills by partnering his constable. The chief joke in Salad Days is the repeated revelation that the Dionysian enemy lies within the Establishment. In their different ways, both The Boy Friend and Salad Days respond to the change from a post-war Labour to a Conservative government in 1951, which confronted artists with the contradiction between the social consensus upholding the liberal values of a welfare state and the increasingly oppressive political climate of Cold War paranoia.

Although the strain of camp irreverence and humour extends into the work of Slade/Reynolds and, even more obviously, that of Wilson in the late 1950s and the 1960s, 15 overt references to homosexuality were forbidden by stage censorship and, with the odd exception, 16 gay or queer culture was an underground phenomenon while camp was largely confined to radio and television comedy, films, 17 and entertainment on the club circuit. The demi-monde of Soho and the East End does infiltrate the musical after 1956 by way of shows such as Expresso Bongo (1958), The Crooked Mile (1959), and Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be (1959), whose intermingling of gamblers, policemen, gangsters, prostitutes, and effeminate interior decorators, while more inclusive in representing a bohemian environment, nevertheless marginalizes homosexual characters as comic stereotypes. By the early 1960s serious young playwrights such as Shelagh Delaney, Joe Orton, and Harold Pinter were offering subtle challenges to censorship by their more honest and adult portrayal of gay characters. It was only in 1966, however, that John Osborne’s A Patriot for Me , a historical drama about the homosexual Colonel Redl, was so explicit that, together with other plays at the Royal Court, it provoked calls for the outright abolition of theatre censorship, which occurred in 1968. 18

Mainstream British musicals have until the beginning of the millennium generally avoided representing overtly homosexual characters. Sandy Wilson’s Valmouth (1958) and Richard O’Brien’s Rocky Horror Show (1973) might appear as exceptions, but each was conceived as a ‘fringe’ show addressing a minority audience, and the latter only really became a mainstream entertainment once the screen version had established itself as a cult classic. Valmouth is a musical adaptation of Ronald Firbank’s outrageously camp novel. It is not difficult to interpret the decadent town of Valmouth—which is eventually destroyed by an erupting volcano—as an emblem of the bohemian demi-monde, a self-contained milieu with its own bizarre norms of behaviour. The Rocky Horror Show deliberately addressed a younger, more progressive audience, paying homage to the much-vaunted androgynity of seventies ‘glamrock’ icons such as David Bowie and Marc Bolan through the transvestite and bisexual machismo of Tim Curry’s Frank’n’furter and subverting bourgeois expectations by exposing Brad and Janet, the generic ‘straight’ couple from fifties B-movies, as sexually repressed neophytes desperately in need of the liberation achieved during the succeeding carnival of homo- and heterosexual seductions.

Aiming to appeal to an older and mainstream audience demographic, Lee Hall and Elton John’s Billy Elliot: The Musical is far subtler than The Rocky Horror Show in its treatment of sexual difference. The stage show transforms the tightly focused depiction of a Geordie 19 mining community on strike in Stephen Daldry’s film (2000) by making extensive use of ballet and several other types of dance in order both to enhance the show’s entertainment value as a musical and to place greater emphasis on the trope of gender and sexuality. The musical’s more complex interrogation of sexism and homophobia reflects the concerns of an epoch during which Western countries have made progress in gender and sexual politics by recognizing discrimination against women and LGBT individuals and legislating to remove it. The central focus of the film on the politics of class is dialectically counterpoised in the musical with a critique of working-class masculine identity. The opposition between the ‘rough’ (implicitly masculine) aesthetic of politically engaged leftist theatre and the refined (supposedly feminine) but politically uncommitted ‘high art’ form of ballet is resolved in the popular form of variety. The pleasure of such variety entertainment is generated by an exploitation of the inherent subversiveness of camp, which has since the 1970s made audiences complicit in the acceptance of alternative sexualities—a quintessentially British way of affirming the equality of all individuals within a community.

Marxian Aesthetics and Working-Class Culture: ‘A Good Night Out’

The rough theatre aesthetic inscribed in both the subject matter and form of Billy Elliot invokes the socialist theatre movement which made a significant impact on musical theatre of the late 1950s. Emblematic of this approach is the work of Joan Littlewood who must be reckoned one of the two most important directors in the British theatre since 1945. 20 From her days with Unity Theatre in the thirties, she and her partner, the folk singer Jimmy Miller (who later called himself Ewan McColl), pioneered the development of Marxian aesthetics in British theatre and radio through the use of popular and folk songs within plays (the best-known was Brendan Behan’s The Hostage , 1958) to create a unique type of community drama that faithfully depicted the harsh realities of working-class life. 21 Revealing the influence of Brecht well before his approach to theatre became fashionable in Britain during the late 1950s, Littlewood’s vision of working-class culture represented a direct attack on what was from her perspective a decadent society sanctioned by a corrupt authority; today one might recognize the cultural marginalization of the working class in the fifties as parallel to the suppression of homosexuality by both the police and the institution of censorship.

Littlewood’s revelatory framing of Oh What a Lovely War as an end-of-the-pier Pierrot show motivated the ironic deployment of popular songs from the First World War to satirize the blindly sentimental way in which the horrific slaughter of men had been memorialized. Her concept of popular theatre foreshadowed the folk aesthetic (‘a good night out’) of John McGrath’s company, 7:84 Scotland (there was also a 7:84 England). 22 These two groups presented musicals or plays with songs in community centres, village halls, and pubs, during the 1970s and early 1980s with the aim of exposing the inequalities of British society from a Marxist perspective. 23 Most successful was the groundbreaking and influential The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973), which dramatized the ruthless exploitation of the Highlands by capitalists between 1746 and 1973, while also telling stories of local resistance. McGrath drew on an eclectic mix of entertainment traditions, including music hall, pantomime, farce, the ceilidh, 24 and folk song as well as a range of theatrical techniques—documentary, verbatim, and revue—to construct radically left-wing shows that engaged audiences both through direct political argument and by appealing to the visceral pleasure of traditional folk entertainments.

A Brechtian Fable: Blood Brothers

Not as radical as the work of 7:84 but very much in the tradition of a ‘good night out’, Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers (1983) 25 premiered at the Liverpool Playhouse and then transferred to the Lyric Theatre in London where it had a short engagement in 1983. However, Bill Kenwright’s touring production was extremely successful around the country and when it played again in London in 1988 it was a huge hit, running until 2011. As a playwright who loved pop music, Russell’s Liverpool background helped him tap into a rich vein of music and stories and he alternated between writing plays and musicals with apparent ease. Written near the end of Margaret Thatcher’s first term of office as prime minister, Blood Brothers expresses some of the anger and impotence felt by working-class people in the north of England, who saw their traditional industries being abandoned, leaving towns and villages derelict in the wake of the new monetarist policies of the Conservative government. The piece illustrates the harsh realities of northern working-class existence just before the events represented in Billy Elliot actually took place.

The story of Blood Brothers is told by a narrator as an urban folk tale, the score consisting of emotive pop ballads and rhythmically driving satirical rock songs: it contrasts the lives of twin brothers, one of whom has been given over for adoption by the cleaner Mrs Johnstone, to her wealthy and childless employer, Mrs Lyons (‘My Child’). Mrs Johnstone’s story reveals the archetypal destiny of a single working-class mother. An uneducated woman with seven children, her husband had left her while she was pregnant with the twins:

A working-class mother in 1980s Liverpool: Petula Clark as Mrs Johnstone with David Cassidy as her son Mickey in the Broadway production (1993) of Willy Russell’s Blood Brothers .

Then, of course, I found That I was six weeks overdue We got married at the registry An’ then we had a do [……] They said the bride was lovelier than Marilyn Monroe And we went dancing Yes, we went dancing [……] My husband, he walked out on me A month or two ago For a girl they say who looks a bit like Marilyn Monroe And they go dancing They go dancing. (81–82)

As in Salad Days and Billy Elliot , dancing provides an image of utopian pleasure, signifying the joy of escape or liberation from a harsh or repressive environment, the difference being that the aforementioned musicals display dance on stage at every opportunity, whereas virtually no dancing is actually presented in Blood Brothers , because much of the story is told in song rather than enacted on stage.

The narrative structure of the musical conforms precisely to Brecht’s notion that in epic theatre the story ( fabel ) should be constructed in the complicated shape of a narrative rather than directly embodied in dramatic action. Not only does a narrator figure appear throughout the course of Blood Brothers , but many of the characters also narrate their own histories in song. This is designed to promote critical reflection and, ultimately, judgement by the spectator, rather than simple and immediate identification with the central characters.

While Mickey, the charming but aimless son, remains stuck in an impoverished environment that offers no opportunities, his brother Eddie is brought up as a conventional scion of the upper middle class and eventually attends university. Despite Mrs Lyons’s determination to keep the boys apart, they meet, become friends, and—not knowing their true relation—declare themselves ‘blood brothers’ (‘My Friend’). In order to put an end to the friendship Mrs Lyons moves away from the area, but, by chance, the council rehouses the Johnstone family in the same suburb, so the boys meet again (‘That Guy’), both falling in love with the same girl, Linda, who marries Mickey when Eddie goes away to university. Mickey eventually becomes a thief and is caught and sent to prison (‘Madman’), during which time Eddie becomes first Linda’s comforter and then her lover. When Mickey is released he jealously confronts Eddie but when his mother informs him in a bid to stop him from shooting Eddie that they are twin brothers, he screams, ‘You! Why didn’t you give me away? ( … almost uncontrollable with rage. ) … I could’ve been him!’ (158). Mickey accidentally kills Eddie, while the police shoot Mickey to prevent him from doing any harm to Mrs Johnstone or Linda (‘Tell Me It’s Not True’).

The musical is a simple but powerful examination of the effects of class in British society, its representation of the interaction between genetics and social environment revealing an almost Sophoclean notion of destiny. Clearly Blood Brothers struck a chord with the kind of British audiences who might have found Sondheim’s musicals alien in terms of both subject matter and musical style. Russell’s ability to evoke the idiom and manners of a ‘Scouse’ 26 environment is remarkable, as is his talent for writing songs redolent of the era and milieu, while the melodramatic plot structure, although somewhat contrived, has proved very attractive to a broad audience. Significantly, the exclusive focus on class politics in Blood Brothers precludes any use of the camp strategies of variety: correspondingly, neither sexual orientation nor gender is problematized in any way.

Early Responses to the Political Legacy of Thatcherism

Our Day Out , originally a television play (1977) but rewritten as a musical for the Liverpool Everyman (1983) with music by Bob Eaton, Chris Mellor, and Russell himself, continued the exploration of working-class subjects in a demotic idiom. 27 Willy Russell followed the majority of leftist male writers of his generation in concentrating exclusively on the politics of class rather than gender, race, or sexual identity. Howard Goodall and Melvyn Bragg’s The Hired Man (1984), a musical based on Bragg’s historical novel, also focuses exclusively on the representation of the exploitation of working-class men by capitalist farm owners and businessmen. In the early 1970s newly established feminist 28 and gay theatre groups began to create performances with the aim of demonstrating that ‘the personal is political’; these companies, however, had limited impact on mainstream theatre, remaining largely ghettoized until the 1990s.

The examination of the relationship between characters and their local communities in several films, plays, and musicals since the mid-1980s represented opposition to the radical social transformation engendered by the manifold failure of Conservative policies to maintain social harmony. Two works by Jim Cartright directly exposed the devastation of northern communities caused by the Thatcher government’s policy of closing mines and privatizing national industries. These were plays with songs rather than full-blown musicals, but their use of popular songs was extremely evocative. Road (1986) deployed an eclectic range of popular songs to invoke emotionally charged ‘folk’ memories at key dramatic moments. The Rise and Fall of Little Voice (1992) included even more songs in its representation of a painfully shy young woman’s (‘Little Voice’) transformation into a surprisingly confident performer when channelling a range of iconic fifties and sixties singers that her late father had loved. Set in a cheaply over-decorated house and a tawdry northern working-class club, the show anatomized a dying world whose characters inhabit their fantasies of the past or future as an escape from the ugly reality of the present. Both shows achieved great commercial success in theatres around the country and were later filmed.

Billy Elliot as British History Play

With its location in a mining village in County Durham between 1984 and 1985, Billy Elliot cleverly refunctions the strategies of socialist theatre of that epoch in conjunction with the variety entertainment of the time, thereby initiating a complex play of intertextuality. Brechtian effects frame the openings of both Act 1 and Act 2: the action begins with the entrance through the auditorium of a very small boy who then sits at the front of the stage to watch newsreel footage proclaiming the nationalization of the mining industry by the newly elected Labour Party soon after the Second World War. The second act opens with a performance by members of the Easington community reminiscent of the kind of political agitprop produced by John McGrath’s 7:84 company before the Thatcher government removed its funding in the mid-1980s.

Thatcher’s ruthless determination to establish an unregulated free-market economy without any state intervention, revealed a total lack of concern for the well-being of working-class towns and villages 29 and the resulting political unrest was regarded as justification for the increased deployment of the police force as a nationally coordinated arm of government authority. 30 In Billy Elliot , images of social division and economic disintegration are presented through a mixture of Brechtian ‘epic’ and dialectical techniques as the show exploits popular British forms of entertainment in order to construct an unusually coherent musical revealing the profound irony that Billy’s success coincides with the community’s failure to prevent the destruction of its way of life.

Political history becomes a frame for the narrative from the first moment of the performance, the anthem-like ‘The Stars Look Down’ clearly expressing the political solidarity of the village in opposition to the government’s decision to close unprofitable coal mines. The tradition of such pit communities is enacted in the singing of this anthem; implicit in that tradition is the assumption that boys such as Billy are destined to be miners, like Billy’s brother Tony, his father Jackie, and his father’s father before him. A scene in which strikers leave the Elliot house to man the picket line, is followed by one in the community hall, in which the masculine culture of the miners is ironically indicated by the comedy of a few small boys, including Billy and his friend Michael, lamely going through the motions of a boxing lesson.

Masculine Versus Feminine Cultures

Having failed to register any enthusiasm for the typically masculine sport of boxing, Billy stays to give the keys of the hall to the ballet teacher and gets caught up in the conventionally feminine activity of learning ballet. As performed by Mrs Wilkinson and her class, ‘Shine’ depicts the clumsy attempts of a gaggle of naughty and untalented girls to learn a dance routine. Its humour stems from the teacher’s sarcastic commentary on the hopeless nature of her task as, cigarette in mouth, she exhorts her pupils to ‘smile’, the lyrics at times becoming a rueful ‘voice-over’ of her observations of the class:

Doesn’t matter if you’re short or squat, Cerebrally challenged, completely shot; You might have it or might not, All you really have to do is, All you really have to do is shine. Give ’em that old razzle dazzle and shine. 31

With the aid of a hand-held smoke machine the dance sequence metamorphoses into a rather ramshackle dress rehearsal for which the girls have donned pink ballet tutus in an attempt at showbiz sparkle. 32

The action is progressed and the character of the sardonic, world-weary Mrs Wilkinson is developed in the song, whose music and lyrics evoke the stale clichés of endlessly recycled showbiz numbers that by the 1980s were ubiquitous in working-class pubs and budget holiday resorts and which became the staple of television variety and game shows of the period. The number perfectly exemplifies the amateur entertainment of small communities without immediate access to professional theatre. Such second-hand and second-rate commercial entertainment provides a kitsch soundtrack to the humdrum lives of once-proud miners, the sounds of whose true culture have earlier been voiced in the familiar choral convention of the opening song, redolent of an authentic folk tradition of community singing that predates the mass-produced ‘hits’ of the popular music industry.

Showbiz razzle dazzle in a northern community centre: Mrs Wilkinson (Ruthie Henshall) and her ballet class, including a baffled Billy (Elliot Hanna) in ‘Shine’ from Billy Elliot at the Victoria Palace Theatre, 2014.

Traditional working-class values are illustrated in a rather different way in the haunting flashback to the dance halls of the forties and fifties that accompanies Billy’s grandmother’s song of reminiscence (‘Grandma’s Song’) in which the strong-willed old woman who says she can remember the General Strike of 1926, concludes that ‘if I had my time again, / Oh I’d do it without the help of men’. Here the superb musical staging by Peter Darling creates the ghost-like atmosphere of courting rituals in vanished dance halls of thirty-five years previously when ‘women were women and men they were men’ in order for the grandmother to share her memories of an abusive relationship while offering a darkly comic critique of the life allotted to her within a rigidly patriarchal society.

But we’d go dancing, he was me own Brando [……] But we were free for an hour or three, From the people we had to be, But in the morning, we were sober.

The delightful and complex performance of Ann Emery 33 provided the audience with an extraordinarily vivid portrayal of the resilience of working-class women of an earlier era, whose potential talent and intelligence went unnoticed and therefore remained unfulfilled.

Song-and-Dance as Political Metaphor

If ‘Grandma’s Song’ exhibits the sophistication of the staging as an element of Billy Elliot’s musical dramaturgy, ‘Solidarity’ represents a model of how musical theatre writing can be integrated with choreography to express the complex meaning of historical narrative. 34 Conflating the ballet class with a stylized representation of the battle between the striking miners and the police, the music, lyrics, and choreographic patterns suggest the multiple meanings of ‘solidarity’: for the miners, it means keeping faith with their trade union and its opposition to an oppressive regime of government-backed bosses; for the police it signifies a legitimate defence of social order as a bulwark against rioters; for the girls it simply means keeping in step together in their dance routine. In the most general sense, the repetition of ‘solidarity’ in the song ironically implies the traditional working-class solidarity that should unite both miners and police against exploitation by capitalist employers, but which has been deliberately broken by the Conservative government’s unfounded promise of a new classless form of meritocracy.

police  Keep it up till Christmas lads,     It means a lot to us     We send our kids to private school     On a private bus     We’ve got a lot to thank you for     Geordie you’re a corker:     A nice extension on the house and a fortnight in Majorca.     Solidarity, solidarity     Solidarity forever

In a virtuoso deployment of stage props, including chairs, policeman’s helmets and clubs, rolled-up newspapers and miner’s helmets, Peter Darling creates a dialectically complex piece of staging that indicates the effect of the large police presence on the life of the striking village. The face-off between straight lines of police and pitmen singing at each other enacts the way police and miners (traditionally linked as working-class comrades) have been set against each other:

miners  Don’t worry lads, we’re on your side;     Solidarity forever.     Solidarity, solidarity     Solidarity forever     We’re proud to be working class,     Solidarity forever.

The extraordinarily witty and detailed musical staging in which pitmen and policeman alternately wear their own and their opposed counterpart’s helmets exposes the interchangeability of warring policemen and miners beneath their uniforms. The irony that both groups of men are unknowingly partnering the girls in their dance while actually going about the business of the strike is a clever way of depicting the way the life of the community continues in spite of the disruptive events of the strike:

girls We’re proud to be working class, Solidarity forever. police You fucking worms You fucking moles You fucking Geordie shits We’re here to kick your Geordie arse You little Geordie gits. miners We’re terrified, We’re petrified, Those words are so obscene. We’ll boot your fuckin’ cockney skulls, Right back to Bethnal Green wilkinson Shine, just shine All you have to do is shine [. ….] girls 12345678

The dainty steps that both burly miners and aggressive policemen unwittingly perform as part of the girls’ rehearsal mockingly highlight the hyper-masculinity of their working-class culture as mere role play: their unexamined homophobia is thereby implicitly exposed as a macho fear of femininity, which manifests itself in their prejudice against ballet as an elitist art form for middle-class women and effete men. During the number Billy progressively exhibits his growing skills as a dancer until at its culmination he takes centre stage in an exciting display of his talent. Ironically, the complexity of the song-and-dance sequence is a refutation of Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assertion in 1987 that ‘there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.’ 35

Working-Class Masculinity and Individual Self-Expression

The patriarchal construction of masculinity is more overtly challenged by the irresistibly camp paean to individuality, ‘Expressing Yourself’. Initially afraid of the stigma of effeminacy, Billy reveals to his eccentric young friend Michael that he has been attending ballet classes; Michael in turn persuades Billy to join him in dressing up in his sister’s clothes. Completely shameless in his love of drag (‘Me Dad does it all the time’) Michael draws Billy into the song-and-dance duet, which climaxes with the neophyte tap dancers being accompanied by a group of giant women’s ‘dresses’ who tap along with them in carnivalesque defiance of gender conformity:

What the hell is wrong with expressing yourself? For trying to be free. If you wanna be a dancer, dance, If you wanna be a miner, mine …

The number succinctly contrasts the unique personality of each boy. Although Michael may be gay he thinks ballet is ‘weird’; Billy’s instinctive attraction to dance certainly does not make him gay, yet each boy has a strong need to assert his own identity in the face of a restrictive society that by policing traditional norms of masculinity offers no creative outlet for men.

When Billy’s father finds out he is missing boxing sessions in order to attend ballet classes, he bans him outright from attending but Billy accepts Mrs Wilkinson’s offer to tutor him secretly in preparation for an audition for the Royal Ballet School. When she devises a new dance for Billy, the thickset accompanist Mr Braithwaite progressively strips off his outer garments during the exhilarating song-and-dance number ‘Born to Boogie’ to reveal himself as a rather nimble dancer in tracksuit trousers and a skintight T-shirt. The routine is an expression of the pure joy of dance to a song that sounds like a typical Elton John rock ’n’ roll hit from the early eighties—exactly the kind of music that was ubiquitous on radio and television in 1984:

From the day of creation We were the dance sensation. Come on and shake yer bootie, Cos we were born to boogie.

Billy’s father and brother, Tony, prevent him from sneaking off to Newcastle for the audition as the battle between police and striking miners intensifies. On entering the house to enquire after Billy, Mrs Wilkinson is trapped into a confrontation with these two angry men who are incensed that she has ignored Jackie Elliot’s wishes.

During the ensuing argument Tony calls her ‘a middle class cow’, while Mrs Wilkinson bluntly criticizes the men’s pig-headed and antediluvian working-class pride. After she leaves, the men go out to join the pickets while Billy storms upstairs, flinging himself on his bed in black despair and resentment, his kicking and shouting segueing into the ‘Angry Dance’. Brilliantly swathed in flashes of red light on a set whose individual sections move upwards and downwards, revealing Billy stamping down the stairs from his bedroom and jumping down a manhole into the sewers while he rages helplessly both against the war of police and pitmen around and above him and against the miners’ prejudices, the combined forces of which have conspired to prevent him from doing what he loves most deeply. The violence on the street that actually occurred in towns like Easington is graphically depicted when the policemen form a line of fibreglass riot shields to halt protesting strikers, against which Billy repeatedly throws himself as part of his furious clog dance. Eventually exhausted by his futile efforts, Billy collapses downstage centre; his angry protest dance has failed to stop the advance of the riot police. As the audience begins to applaud the boy playing the role, he gets up and it is the actor, not Billy, who gives a challenging look at the audience as he simply walks offstage—a Brechtian ‘distancing’ device to effect a separation between actor and character. 36

Musical Theatre and Political Protest

The opening of the second act brings two miners—the boxing teacher and Billy’s brother Tony—in front of the stage curtain. Incongruously dressed as Santa Claus and his elf they address the theatre audience as if they are working-class spectators at a camp Christmas pantomime. This instantly places the spectators in the position of members of the mining community. The makeshift show-within-a-show (‘Merry Christmas Maggie Thatcher’) comes as a complete surprise, illustrating the life of a community united in its hatred of the prime minister, caricatured as a demonic marionette bestriding an entire stage filled with miniature glove puppets of Conservative politicians such as Michael Heseltine, trade union leaders including Arthur Scargill, 37 and even a cow representing the free milk that Mrs Thatcher has now ‘stolen’ from schoolchildren: 38

They’ve come to raid your stockings And to steal your Christmas pud But don’t be too downhearted Cos it’s all for your own good. The economic infrastructure Must be swept away To make way for business parks And lower rates of pay

The sadness beneath the surface of the jollification is revealed when Jackie Elliot is asked to sing; instead of obliging with the requested ‘Big Spender’ or another such cabaret-style pop song, he somewhat drunkenly performs a rendition of ‘Deep into the Ground’, a moving folk lamentation for his deceased wife, in the chorus of which he is later joined by the other revellers.

Oh once I loved a woman, She meant all the world to me. Saw ourselves a future As far as I could see But she was only thirty-seven When they took her down from me, And buried her deep in the ground. Oh the winter wind can blow me colder Oh the summer’s heat can parch me dry But I’ll love these dark, dark hills forever, And I won’t leave them until I die.

After the others have straggled off home, Billy completes the song for his sobbing, inebriated father as they stand in the deserted and cold community hall. Jackie leaves his son alone with Michael who makes a touching if somewhat clumsy romantic advance. Although Billy declares he is ‘not a poof,’ his response is sensitive because he doesn’t shy away from physical contact; he even makes Michael a gift of a ballet tutu.

‘He Could Be a Star’: Individual Success at the Expense of Solidarity

Left alone, Billy plays a tape of Swan Lake , during which a vision of his future self as a professional dancer appears to perform a fantasy ballet, in which the young and the adult Billy together offer a glimpse of the aesthetic accomplishment towards which Billy aspires. This extraordinary piece of drama has in this particular moment the strangely magical effect of a transformation scene in a pantomime: on the verge of seeming kitsch, Tchaikovsky’s overfamiliar music nevertheless evokes all the idealized and heroic beauty of ballet as Billy ‘flies’ with the aid of theatre technology. The sequence never fails to elicit ecstatic cheers and applause from the audience as Billy ends it standing in front of his perplexed father who has re-entered to take him home. Having directly witnessed Billy’s talent, Jackie decides to visit Mrs Wilkinson as he now wishes to help Billy get to London for a Royal Ballet School audition.

Jackie’s determination to earn money to pay for his son’s trip to London himself rather than accept Mrs Wilkinson’s financial aid—a typical example of the crippling effects of the masculine working-class pride she has accused him of earlier—obliges him to cross the picket line so he can return to work, thereby causing a direct confrontation with Billy’s brother Tony in the song ‘He Could Be a Star’. Anthem-like verses sung alternately by Jackie and Tony concisely express the opposed ideologies of socialism (the communitarian values of social welfare) and capitalism (success as a reward for the exceptional individual) that have motivated the entire plot:

tony This isn’t about us Dad It’s not about the kid It’s all of us, it’s everybody’s chance It’s everybody’s future It’s everybody’s past It’s not about a bairn who wants to dance. [. …] dad He could be a star for all we know We don’t know how far he can go, And no one else can give what I can give

The miners’ agreement to donate money to help Billy signifies the traditional solidarity of comrades in their struggle against the ruling class:

We’re all in this together Jack There is another way All for one And one for all

Contrasting with Billy’s desire to ‘shine’ as a ballet star is the miners’ pride in the altruism and courage that helps them to shine in fighting for justice:

We will go and we will shine We will go and seize the time We will all have pride in how we live.

A ‘scab’ (strike-breaker) generously offers Billy money to cover all his expenses but Tony and the miners are reluctant to let him take it, even though the amount they themselves are able to muster is not nearly sufficient. The incident is poignant because the fact that Billy finally takes the cash suggests that the miners’ strike is about to fail, indicating the crumbling of the workers’ solidarity in their struggle against the selfish individualism of the capitalist system.

When Billy and his father arrive at the Royal Ballet in Covent Garden, they feel out of place in the posh surroundings and somewhat intimidated by the rarefied and seemingly elitist atmosphere, but when they leave, the female chair of the audition panel wishes them good luck with the strike, nicely revealing the solidarity of the metropolitan arts world with the socialist battle for justice being fought in the industrial north. 39 In answer to her question of what Billy feels when he is dancing, he sings ‘Electricity’, a celebration of the feelings of power and freedom generated by dance as a form of artistic expression, a number that then segues into an exhilarating physical demonstration of the significance of the lyrics. Tellingly, in the following scene the happy news of Billy’s acceptance by the Royal Ballet School is immediately undermined by the announcement that the strike has collapsed; by contrast, a Broadway musical would, typically, delay the news of Billy’s success until after the sad realization of the miners’ failure in order to provide the conventional showbiz uplift.

As Billy prepares for his departure to London, the miners accompany his leave-taking by singing the deeply nostalgic ‘Once Were Kings’—a lament for the loss of their livelihood and way of life due to the imminent closure of the pits. The men’s reticence makes the scene profoundly moving for what is left unsaid and the final image of the pitmen, with their helmet lamps shining into the auditorium from the darkness as they descend underground, is a devastating symbol of their heroism in defeat. The play ends with Billy bound for London, walking off the stage into the auditorium on his own but leaving his gay friend Michael alone on his bike 40 in the dystopian wasteland of a doomed mining community. As the curtain slowly descends, this final image of abandonment symbolizes the tragic destruction of a traditional way of life. There is no celebration of individual triumph, only a harsh realization that the miners and the isolated young gay man share the fate of being on the wrong side of history.

Billy Elliot is a great work of popular art, not only because its success story of a boy who wants to become a ballet dancer is told in a thoroughly heartfelt and entertaining way, but also because the sociocultural dimensions of a turning point in British political history are so authentically conveyed in action, speech, song and dance. As a performance text it is sophisticated and densely wrought: the scenography always contributes to the significance of the action. The rather ramshackle appearance of what is actually a superbly designed set 41 —which characters give the illusion of pushing and pulling into place by hand—evokes the milieu of a poor but respectable household with its make-do-and-mend decoration and dated electrical appliances, as well as utilitarian public halls in Victorian buildings that have been successively adapted for multiple purposes in an eclectic concatenation of styles. In the picket line scene the authentic Conservative party poster against the rear wall of the stage with its cunningly manipulative headline LABOUR ISN’T WORKING , precisely pinpoints the historical moment with the uncanny percipience of hindsight.

In Billy Elliot the traditionally macho aspects of left-wing working-class popular culture are subverted by a long-standing British habit of camp innuendo to undo the repression of femininity that is commonly manifest in British culture as reflex homophobia. The stage musical brings to the surface of attention what is merely a subtext of the film—a complex focus on masculinity that introduces the perspective of the twenty-first century to recognize that the political includes the personal. While the politics of social reform and revolution are the film’s overt subject, in the musical version the psychology motivating the routine sexism and homophobic anxieties of the miners constitutes an important aspect of Billy’s conflict in his gradual realization that he wants to be a ballet dancer; the staging/choreography ‘queers’ the hyper-masculinity of the miners, relativizing what this particular society regards as universal, thereby initiating a dialectical argument around the relationship between class, gender, sexual orientation, popular and ‘high’ art. These themes are comically reprised in the finale—not a part of the action but a theatrical coda to the final narrative moment which presents a Dionysian celebration of the unrepressed, in which dancing miners in white tutus worn over orange boiler suits join the whole cast in a joyous and extended curtain call.

As a musical adaptation it seizes the opportunity to let dance do the work of evoking an aspirant dancer’s passion for the art, representing the thrill of dancing by creating dance that itself thrills us. If, as Richard Dyer has claimed, musicals generate pleasure in the momentary contemplation of utopia, Billy Elliot ’s deeply political use of an array of entertainment forms to critique the inhumanity of unregulated capitalism in the 1980s while engaging its audiences in celebrating the possibilities for personal freedom in the future, knowingly exemplifies the idea that the genre is always more than ‘only entertainment’. 42

These included rock operas like Jesus Christ Superstar (1970), sung-through epics such as Evita (1976) and Les Misérables (1985), musical melodramas such as The Phantom of the Opera (1986), and jukebox shows like Buddy—the Buddy Holly Story (1989) and Mamma Mia! (1999).

British variety is a form of concert entertainment derived from music hall in the late nineteenth century that survived until the early 1960s but was largely replaced as a form of popular entertainment by television; the annual Royal Variety Performance on television is the last remaining trace of the form.

3. John Lahr , ‘On Your Toes’, New Yorker , 4 July 2005, http://www.newyorker.com/critics/theatre/articles/050704crth_theatre , accessed 10 July 2015.

Young performers who have recently played Billy have been superb tap dancers; the choreography is in fact adapted to suit the special talents of each individual boy.

Peter Nicholls’s Privates on Parade (1977) had focused on an army entertainment corps led by a sergeant who was a drag queen, but that was a play with music which was premiered by the Royal Shakespeare Company and not a commercial musical.

The most famous television variety show of the early 1960s was Sunday Night at the London Palladium , while many TV comics who had started in pubs, working men’s clubs, and variety became household names on TV comedy and variety shows.

These stars achieved international fame in English-speaking countries outside the United States on radio, film, and later TV shows.

Such stars as Cicely Courtneidge, Jack Hulbert, Noel Coward, Gertrude Lawrence, Jack Buchanan, Jessie Matthews, Peggy Wood, Hermione Gingold, Hermione Baddeley, Evelyn Laye, Dorothy Dickson, Olive Gilbert, Bobby Howes, and Lupino Lane were trained theatre performers who made their names in revue and musical comedy.

Coward and Novello had for years been writing ‘retro’ operettas.

The song was first performed in the 1928 revue This Year of Grace.

Wilson’s trenchant criticism of the crudely camp production that the show received on Broadway where it starred Julie Andrews is evidence that he wished the show to maintain a surface innocence.

Intimate revue was the most ubiquitous form of musical theatre during and immediately after the Second World War.

The asexual nature of the relationship is in marked contrast to the overtly heterosexual attraction of the central characters in contemporary American musicals, and gives credence to the notion of a gay subtext in Salad Days.

This is one of the chief strategies of literary deconstruction.

See, in particular, Wilson’s Valmouth (1958) and His Monkey Wife (1971).

Sung by a very effeminate interior decorator, Lionel Bart’s song ‘Contemp’ry’ in Fings Ain’t Wot They Use T’Be is a rare example.

The series of Carry On films, running from 1958 until 1978, is one of the most famous examples of the camp comic tradition that has persistently represented sex according to the conventions of seaside postcards as ‘naughty’ and ridiculous.

Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey (1958), Joe Orton’s The Ruffian on the Stair (1963), and Harold Pinter’s The Collection (1964) were among the earliest plays to represent homosexual characters and relationships as aspects of ordinary life.

Person from the Newcastle area.

Her only rival is Peter Brook.

See Ben Macpherson on Joan Littlewood, Chapter 19 , and Robert Lawson-Peebles, Chapter 24 , on the use of song in socialist drama.

The company was named after the fact that 7 per cent of the population owned 84 per cent of its wealth.

These plays include Trees in the Wind (1971), The Fish in the Sea (1972), The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black Black Oil (1973), and Blood Red Roses (1980).

The ceilidh is a traditional Gaelic entertainment.

25. All quotations from Blood Brothers are taken from Willy Russell , Educating Rita, Stags and Hens, and Blood Brothers: Two Plays and a Musical (London: Methuen Modern Plays, 1986). Further page references will be given within the text.

A ‘Scouser’ is a working-class person from Liverpool.

27. The narrative of deprived schoolchildren being taken by their teachers on an outing depicts a day of anarchic fun in a café, a zoo, Conway Castle, and the beach; it provides a realistic insight into the joy and pain of growing up. Underlying the humour, a darker theme emerges—the realization that this day of escape from their depressing existence is likely to be the happiest these children will ever experience: ‘Why can’t it always be this way / Why can’t it last for more than just a day / The sun in the sky and the seagulls flying by / I think I’d like to stay / Then it could always be this way.’ Willy Russell , Our Day Out: The Musical (London: Methuen, 2011), 62.

The pre-eminent feminist theatre companies established in the 1970s included Red Rag, Cunning Stunts, Mouth and Trousers; Gay Sweatshop was the first and for some years the only gay theatre group in Britain.

29. ‘Mrs Thatcher and her ministers made it conclusively clear that they felt no responsibility for the promotion of social harmony and that, in the pursuit of longer-term aims, they found confrontation and violence entirely acceptable.’ Arthur Marwick , British Society Since 1945 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003), 289.

Although railwaymen and other industrial unions did not universally support the coal miners, there was widespread sympathy for the hardships suffered by miners and their families throughout the country, which even extended to the managers of some of the mines. See Marwick, British Society Since 1945 , 288–289.

John Lahr’s comment on ‘Shine’ revealingly illustrates his blindness to the cultural context. Although his dismissal of the song as ‘a third-generation Xerox of Chicago’s “Razzle Dazzle” ’ ( Lahr, ‘On Your Toes’ ) is in some respects apt, it misses the point of Elton John’s clever pastiche of seventies and eighties pop-style versions of Broadway show music, the kind of music that Elton John himself was writing during that era.

Astonishingly, Ann Emery has played this role for ten years in London with only a few months’ break to perform in Betty Blue Eyes (2011).

Without didacticism, the number alludes to the complex conflicts of interest motivating the events of the coal miners’ strike: this was the first time in British history the police had been deployed against strikers in riot gear and using riot shields and, while there was violence on both sides, these events acquired powerful symbolic value in demonstrating the successful strategy of the Thatcher government in breaking the traditional solidarity of workers to create divisions within and between trades unions by setting one section of workers against others through a manipulation of the occasionally conflicting financial interests of each, as ‘Solidarity’ and other songs in Billy Elliot indicate.

Lahr’s failure to understand the Brechtian techniques exploited throughout the show can be seen in his lame criticism of the end of Act 1: ‘[A]fter Billy’s sensational explosion at the police, Daldry can’t properly clinch the moment. Billy lies back on the ground, then simply gets up and walks offstage: end of Act I. Fatigue seems to have blinkered Daldry’s critical ability.’ Lahr, ‘On Your Toes’ .

Arthur Scargill was president of the National Union of Miners (NUM) from 1982 to 2002 and therefore an iconic figure in the opposition to the Thatcher government.

Apart from failing to identify the tradition of working-class Christmas entertainment cleverly exploited in the scene, Lahr’s criticism of its puppets—hardly avant-garde!—reveals a total ignorance of its political significance, ‘But, out of a kind of narrative desperation, Daldry is forced to borrow from the tattered grab bag of avant-garde tricks: behemoth puppets, masks on the backs of heads—any surprise to cover up the lacklustre book and music.’ Lahr, ‘On Your Toes’ .

The metropolitan arts world was as directly opposed to the Thatcher government’s policies as was the NUM, as it threatened savage cuts to government subsidy for the arts.

The term ‘on yer bike’ became a catchphrase in the 1980s, indicating the need for unemployed youngsters to stop loitering and move on, but with the implication that they should get on their bicycles to seek gainful employment in another town or village—a reflection of the devastation of the economy that by the end of the 1980s had left entire towns and villages derelict.

The set was designed by Ian McNeil.

42. See Richard Dyer , Only Entertainment (London: Routledge, 1992).

Anon. ‘Margaret Thatcher in Quotes: Key Comments from Britain’s First Female Prime Minister.’ The Guardian , 8 April 2013. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/apr/08/margaret-thatcher-quotes , accessed 13 August 2015.

Dyer, Richard . Only Entertainment . London: Routledge, 1992 .

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Lahr, John . ‘On Your Toes.’ New Yorker , 4 July 2005. http://www.newyorker.com/critics/theatre/articles/050704crth_theatre , accessed 10 July 2015.

Marwick, Arthur . British Society Since 1945. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 .

Russell, Willy . Educating Rita, Stags and Hens, and Blood Brothers: Two Plays and a Musical. London: Methuen Modern Plays, 1986 .

Russell, Willy . Our Day Out: The Musical . London: Methuen, 2011 . www.themusicallyrics.com/b/177-billy-elliot.html , accessed 22 October 2013.

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Notes & Analysis on Billy Elliot

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Resource Description

THESIS STATEMENTS  

A thesis statement should be considered in light of the Texts and Human Experiences module. It is important to make sure that the thesis statement is: 

• Complex in idea 
• Texts are distillations of human experiences which showcase the limitations and potential of individuals. 
• Texts offer a representation of human experience that challenges our assumptions and thus intensifies our awareness of self and others. 
• Texts communicate how the quest for truth and purpose drives all human experiences ● Our experiences expose our capacity for fortitude and focus, particularly when our individual ideals are challenged by contextual values / societal expectations 
• Texts suggest human experiences are dependent on an individual’s perception of a situation, their context and their values 
• The representation of human experiences illuminates how our stories are often about the struggle between public conformity and private resistance 
• Texts reinforce the constructs and stereotypes that are restrictive of an individual’s potential, asserting they must be challenged  
• … texts are a reflection / texts depict shared human experiences to assert that as individuals, we respond differently to similar situations as a consequence/ outcome of our unique personal qualities.. 
• Texts represent human experiences so as to record/expose the complex nature of the individual by suggesting that whilst we share a common fragility/vulnerability we have the willpower to transcend obstacles/ alter out pathway in life / shape our future 
• Texts represent timeless and universal truths to prompt empathetic connection, self- reflection and personal insight.

TEXTUAL EVIDENCE  

– Sorted by Key Scene (Vaguely in order of film) 

NOTE: Remind yourself that this is a FILM visual/aural film techniques are what contributes to the film and is much more superior in your essays compared to alliteration or personification. In a single few seconds there are multiple techniques being used. Therefore to enhance your essay you can state e.g. the orchestral non-diegetic piano music accompanied by the high-angle shot of Jackie asserts … .

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