First an Oscar-nominated, BAFTA-winning film, then the stage musical is launched in London to a rapturous welcome. In this awards season the nominations have been streaming in for Billy Elliot – The Musical, and none more so than in the Laurence Olivier Awards, where the musical has the chance to bag no less than nine accolades when the winners are revealed on 26 February. Caroline Bishop had a chat with its director Stephen Daldry and found him in a surprisingly subdued mood…
Stephen Daldry is in the middle of a hectic day, eating his lunch and suffering from a bad cold. Although being interviewed is undoubtedly not going to perk up his day, he is nevertheless terribly polite about it. “It’s a pleasure,” he says, in his genteel, received-pronunciation voice when I say thanks for agreeing to it.
Being the multi award-winning director of the film The Hours and the National Theatre’s revival of An Inspector Calls, Daldry is, of course, a man well-used to the attention that comes with major award nominations, so interviews are par for the course. So much so, in fact, that while you may expect someone newer to the experience to be gushingly eager to talk about their success, Daldry seems reserved and fairly quiet on the subject as if, for him, success is merely a pleasant by-product of the act of creation. Already a recipient of the Best Musical gong at the Evening Standard, Critics’ Circle and Theatregoers’ Choice awards, and nominated nine times in the forthcoming Laurence Olivier Awards, Billy Elliot – The Musical has more than emulated the success of his 2000 film – in fact it recently out-grossed the film’s box-office takings. Daldry, however, is distinctly English about it all: “I think one never knows where success comes from,” he says, “and certainly with the film we never were anticipating the response that we got and I think that’s also true of a show, particularly on this show which was such a challenge in a whole variety of ways.”
“Mostly the kids are with us for some years before they get to be in the show”
Perhaps he simply doesn’t have time to think about his success too much, because managing the stage show is a full-time occupation. From the moment when Elton John, having seen the film on its first public showing at the Cannes Film Festival, suggested to Daldry and writer Lee Hall that they turn it into a musical, Billy Elliot has snowballed into an all-consuming business; a primary reason being that the show stars children – there are currently 50 involved – which throws up a whole host of challenges. “The show takes an awful lot of maintenance and one is always in the process of auditioning, training and rehearsing new Billies into the show, so that never stops,” says Daldry. “We’ve got a school where we train the kids and then we cast them from the school – mostly the kids are with us for some years before they get to be in the show. So all that takes a huge amount of care to maintain.”
Daldry is also busy exploring the possibilities of exporting the show around the world – he is presently looking to Canada, Japan, Australia, Germany and, of course, New York’s Broadway. Again, though, the problem of how to fill the role of Billy and the other child parts is the major logistical obstacle. “It is a huge challenge. In terms of producing and directing the show elsewhere, again the problem of the show is the kids, how you locate, audition and train children in different territories. It is quite an undertaking.”
It’s an undertaking that Daldry seems happy to undertake. He finds it a “fantastic” experience to work with children: “their dedication and talent is extraordinary,” and he treats them exactly the same as he does adult actors. Perhaps this respect for children is one of the reasons for his father-son relationship with Jamie Bell, the star of the film, which was widely reported at the time. Does Bell still come to him for advice? “He used to…obviously we talk about different projects all the time, but I think he’s old enough to make his own decisions. I think it’s the reverse now, it’s up to him to give me the odd tip!”
Daldry now has a child of his own, Annabel, with his wife, New York dancer Lucy Sexton, and the family divide their time between the Big Apple and London. The pair married in 2001 when Daldry was in his early forties, surprising observers as he had previously had a relationship with designer and long-time collaborator Ian MacNeil. This is just one surprising fact in a life that seems full of surprising facts. He can fly a plane, due to his RAF scholarship to Sheffield University (his pilot’s license has expired however: “You have to keep the hours up,” he tells me); he was once a clown’s apprentice in Italy; and he became Artistic Director of the Royal Court at the surprisingly young age of 32.
“It was one of the most wonderful, great fun and challenging periods of my life, but I tend not to miss things”
Following his stint as a clown, Daldry embarked on his directing career, beginning at the Sheffield Crucible theatre in the late 1980s. “I loved being in that theatre, its relationship with its audience was fantastic,” he comments. He says he’d love to go back to regional theatre at some point in the future, “because I think you can create a whole energy and I love the idea of being that close to a community when you’re creating work.” Following the Crucible he became Artistic Director of the Gate theatre in London in 1990, leading it to an Olivier Award for Outstanding
Achievement for its Spanish Golden Age season, before leaving for the Royal Court in 1992. It was during this time that Daldry built up a strong relationship with writers that he still works frequently with now, such as Caryl Churchill, whose A Number and Far Away were both directed by Daldry; and David Hare, who wrote Via Dolorosa and the screenplay to The Hours. He left the Royal Court – again somewhat surprisingly – in 1998 after over-seeing its renovation. “It was one of the most wonderful, great fun and challenging periods of my life, but on the whole I tend not to miss things,” he comments.
The word ‘challenging’ crops up in conversation frequently. Though he seems reluctant to give too much away about himself, his preoccupation with this word reveals a lot about what drives him; his desire for new challenges has certainly influenced his career decisions, such as trying his hand at film directing.
It was Working Title, the British production company famous for Bridget Jones’ Diary and Four Weddings And A Funeral, that encouraged Daldry to go behind the lens, and he started off directing a short film for them, Eight, before embarking on Billy Elliot. “It was a decision to change and explore a different avenue,” he explains. “Billy Elliot then came up through my long relationship with [writer] Lee Hall.”
Neither Hall nor Daldry have a dancing background, however some elements of Hall’s upbringing were drawn upon for the story of the boy who rejects boxing for ballet. “I think that Lee Hall extracted his own childhood. He comes from Newcastle and from a working class area. He realised that perhaps writing about being a writer wouldn’t be the most theatrically dynamic of all subjects!” he laughs. “But none of us ever wanted to be a dancer. It’s about finding a metaphor for change… and that [dancing] seemed to be the best metaphor.”
“Dance as narrative is quite a tricky thing to get around,
as an idea”
Setting the story during the 1980s miners’ strike was “very personal and particular” to both writer and director; at the time Daldry was working with Doncaster Arts Cooperative in a village called Barnborough, South Yorkshire doing a show called Never The Same Again about the experiences of women, particularly miners’ wives, during the strike. “I think that is a subject we always wanted to – and no doubt will continue to [explore].”
The resulting film starred Jamie Bell as Billy and Julie Walters as his dance teacher Mrs Wilkinson, and went on to win three BAFTAS (from 13 nominations) and three Oscar nominations, proving it tugged at the heart strings both sides of the Atlantic. After squeezing in his second, Oscar-winning, film The Hours, Daldry embarked on developing Billy Elliot into a stage musical, another new challenge, as he had never directed a musical before.
“We were very keen, both with the conversations with Elton and myself and Lee and Peter [Darling – choreographer] to use traditions that we all know very well,” says Daldry of the process. He says the team drew on the traditions of Joan Littlewood – whose Theatre Workshop at Theatre Royal Stratford East in the 1950s often depicted non-mainstream communities and voices on stage. For Billy Elliot this meant, for example, “Elton tapping into those great choral traditions of working men’s choruses.”
The choreography brought its own difficulties: “So much of the dance in this show is different to most other shows because it’s directly narrative, so dance as narrative is quite a tricky thing to get around, as an idea,” says Daldry.
“It was huge fun,” he adds. Elton John was a “great collaborator,” and the team worked closely together in a series of workshops to develop how the different numbers would be staged. It was an entirely different process to directing the film, and he feels the two are so different that he is at a loss to put into words why. “The two don’t compare, is the short answer, they are very different experiences with very different approaches. It’s a two year course in what the difference is. So it’s hard to summarise in four sentences.”
Try, I say, and he does. “It can be a very singular and individual way of creating work, doing a film, whereas the theatre is much more collegiate and much more communal. The act of creation is always witnessed by everyone that is around at the time, and the people you start with tend to be the people you finish with, whereas all the reverse is true in the movies.”
“They are very different experiences with very different approaches. It’s a two year course in what the difference is”
It is possibly the most in-depth Daldry goes in this interview. I get the feeling that during his years of experience he has perfected the art of not giving much away. Yet despite this, he seems a charming, gentlemanly sort with impeccable manners. So I forgive him, and let him go back to his busy day after one final attempt to get some inkling into what makes the man. What does he like to do when he’s not working?, I venture. “Sleep!” is his one-word answer. Right then. “Ok darling, I’m sorry to be so under the weather. Lots of love.” And he’s gone. br>
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