GREAT to have one’s flagging faith in musical theatre restored yet again. Last Christmas the stage version of Mary Poppins turned out to be far better than the Disney film and, even though the same director and writer created the original movie, much the same is true of Billy Elliot.

Together, Stephen Daldry and Lee Hall have concocted a piece that’s tougher, bolder and, as my tear-ducts can attest, more moving than its admittedly admirable celluloid precursor.

With its rags-to-riches, or rather poverty-to-piroutte, story, the piece invites sentimentality. But that’s almost entirely missing in the Geordie pit village where young Billy discovers he has a gift for dance. This is a place where grannies remember their late husbands as “bastards”, girls invite boys to look at their fannies, little lads tell them to piss off and ballet is for middle-class poofs.

Moreover, the action exactly coincides with the 1980s miners’ strike — and this comes across far more emphatically than in the film.

It’s not just that the stage is often filled with increasingly baffled and embittered men. It’s that, in the show’s main irony, the musical stage allows even these potato-faced and (sometimes) potato-shaped ballet-haters to hoof effectively away.

And thanks to Peter Darling’s inventive choreography, we get dances of police and miners that start in Keystone style but get more menacing with the introduction of batons and clubs, and end with a stupendous number in which the cops become a terrifying wall of riot shields against which Billy flutters and bangs like a distracted moth.

Liam Mower was the boy chosen from Daldry’s regular threesome to play Billy last night and he proved impressively grave and dignified as an actor and gloriously skilful as a dancer. In an episode that’s perhaps over-the-top, he swirls on to the shoulders of his adult self and skims to the flies to the sound of Swan Lake.

But then the musical as a whole is a celebration of dance: its lure, its excitement, its wonder, its surprises, and the discovery of the self that it demands. Here, of course, is the point. Why should anyone be trapped by class, environment or history, even when intense group loyalty is demanded? And why should anybody be constrained by the conventions of gender? This last is emphasised in the highly comical scene in which Ryan Longbottom, who last night played Billy’s mate Michael, follows some gleeful cross-dressing with some terrific tap.

If there is a disappointment, it is Elton John’s music, which begins promisingly, with a church-like paean to cameraderie, but never seems either tuneful or original. The composer of Candle in the Wind was, I suppose, required to produce something like Davy Lamp in a Hurricane and couldn’t achieve it. Yet the invitation is there, especially in a number in which striking pitmen put on a Christmas panto complete with Spitting Image puppets of Mrs Thatcher and a song balefully calling for her death.

Bad taste? Maybe. But typical of a show filled with passion: for a community, for the rights of the individual and, above all, for the dance.


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