In director Nikolai Foster’s unforgettable new version of Billy Elliot the Musical, all the lines have been blurred. When the miners strike, they run through the aisles and scream their protests just over our heads. Billy’s bedroom sits atop a portable mining shaft, the personal and political packaged as one. When Billy dances, it doesn’t really feel like a dance under Lucy Hind’s beautifully empathic choreography. It is a boxing match. A street fight. An angry conversation. Art isn’t an add-on luxury in Billy’s world. It is his life.
Where Stephen Daldry’s original production, which ran for 11 years, felt like Billy Elliot the Musical – with a capital Musical – Foster’s new version is more like a play with dance and songs. Lee Hall’s script is given plenty of room to breathe and rings with ideas around love and loss, community and isolation, passion and violence. The result is a musical of unusual depth that distils Hall’s play to its essence but also feels nuanced and truthful.
The most memorable songs are gentle heart-stoppers rather than dazzling showstoppers. Elton John’s score was given fairly short shrift when Billy Elliot first opened in 2005, but there’s a Candle in the Wind-esque tenderness in here. A song between Billy and his dead mother, The Letter, is devastating in the purity of loss it evokes and the delicate ditty, Deep Into the Ground, conjures up the deep pain that a refusal to let go – of a lost love, way of life or dying community – can bring.
Joe Caffrey captivates as Billy’s grieving and angry dad, who keeps pushing his sons away just as he pulls them close. Wreathed in cigarette smoke and dripping in cynicism, Sally Ann Triplett’s Mrs Wilkinson has only the faintest twinkle about her, which makes her moments of compassion all the more persuasive. Finally, there is Samuel Newby’s fabulously ballsy Billy. With exposed lighting rigs that climb up to the heavens and a spare stage that sweeps out into the wings, Michael Taylor’s cavernous set cleverly emphasises the depth of Billy’s loneliness, the dizzying scale of his ambition and – most inspiring of all – the stunning bravery it takes for a small child to dream big.
