Funny thing on way to theatre

Dramatist Lee Hall, who has written Shakespeare in Love for the stage, says he’s ordinary. He’s not.

Playwright Lee Hall

People forget that Shakespeare wasn’t posh,” says Lee Hall, a plain-speaking Geordie from Newcastle-upon-Tyne in England’s northeast, where poshness is anathema. “He was a hick from the country trying to make a quick buck with this new popular art form called theatre. He didn’t set out to be the most famous author in the world. He fell into it, in the same way that writers fell into Hollywood and television, and are falling into Netflix now.”

How Shakespeare became, well, Shakespeare, is a theme of Shakespeare in Love, which, as well as the Oscar-laden 1998 period comedy-drama film with its clever script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, is also an epic stage adaptation that was penned (in 2013) by Hall, a dramatist best known for the much garlanded 2000 film Billy Elliot and this year’s Elton John biopic, Rocketman.

“In Lee Hall’s delightfully witty stage adaptation the piece seems to have found its true home,” swooned critics after Shakespeare in Love opened in London’s West End in July 2014. Boasting a cast of 30 (including a large dog) and an early music ensemble playing a Renaissance-inflected score, Hall’s version stays faithful to the best bits of the screenplay while exploring ideas, introducing new subplots and giving more time to all that glorious Shakespearean poetry.

The piece has since been produced in cities in the US and South Africa, and a fresh production toured Britain. This month, courtesy of the Melbourne Theatre Company and renowned director Simon Phillips, Shakespeare in Love makes its Australian premiere. The show is the largest to be undertaken by the MTC. Set-and-costume designer Gabriela Tylesova has overseen a team of 40 wardrobe staff crafting 80 intricate costumes including wig and shoes and hand-sewing 30 Elizabethan ruffs — including a ruff for the dog.

“That dog is the bane of every producer’s life,” grins Hall, 52, surrounded by books and paintings in the study of the Islington, north London, home he shares with his wife, film director Beebon Kidron. “The wolfhound we used in London never did what it was supposed to do. To get him to jump up on them onstage, before the show the actors would have him sniff a sausage they’d then put in their underwear, but it would smell other sausages and go running off.”

Like many of Shakespeare’s comedies, the play’s plot is suitably bonkers. A young Will Shakespeare is struck by writer’s block midway through penning his hoped-for blockbuster, Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter. In need of a muse, one night at a ball he meets Viola, a woman who secretly dresses as a boy actor in his very own theatre company. A real-life Romeo and Juliet tale ensues “onstage” — at what is held to be the Rose Theatre in Bankside in 1597 — while a chaotic scene takes place “backstage” and a third unfolds on a balcony above.

“Writing the whole thing was dizzying, like a giant sudoku,” Hall says, his eyes smiling behind his wire rimmed glasses. “I loved the screenplay because it is a wicked satire on the writer’s role in contemporary Hollywood. Yet as I worked it became evident that this is Tom Stoppard’s love letter to the theatre, the product of a lifetime spent watching rehearsals, chatting in green rooms and pacing around anxiously on opening nights. All of which makes it perfect for the stage.”

He panicked, he says, after agreeing to translate Stoppard, author of the iconic tragicomedy Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead and, at 81, a man widely regarded as Britain’s best living playwright. Hall is only half-joking when he says he owes his career to Stoppard: “My acting debut was in the school hall in 1980 where I played a telephone box in his early play, If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank. Just being a silent part of a Stoppard production was enough. I knew right then that even if I didn’t become an actor my life would be in the theatre.”

On paper, it probably shouldn’t have been. The son of a painter and decorator and a housewife, Hall grew up surrounded by a shipbuilding industry long since defunct but, back then, the expected career route to follow. A bookish child, he read, wrote stories, invented plays, wielded a mean Irish fiddle. And though his state school deemed Shakespeare too obtuse for its students, teachers encouraged his theatrical and literary leanings, steering him towards local opportunities in music and the arts.

Left of centre and instinctively anti-Thatcher — the former British PM was especially loathed by the unions and blue-collar workers of England’s industrial north — Hall took inspiration from post-war writers whose backgrounds felt similar to his own — Edward Bond, Alan Bennett and the fiercely subversive Tony Harrison among them. He admired the kitchen sink realism of films by director Ken Loach, updated Bertolt Brecht’s anti-bourgeois, anti-Nazi drama Fear and Misery of the Third Reich for Thatcherite times and sailed through the entry exam for Cambridge University, thinking little of its reputation for classism and elitism.

“I didn’t really understand that people like me didn’t go to Cambridge,” says the father-of-two with a shrug. “I’m an enthusiast for all sorts of things and never saw the distinction between high and low culture. Wordsworth for me is the same as Bob Marley. They’re both writers who say interesting things beautifully.”

A writer who writes about the lives of working people rather than merely imagining them at work, the proudly populist Hall considers himself of “ordinary” rather than “working class” stock. The working class no longer exists, he says — except in the minds of middle class playwrights.

“Sometimes going to see a play can be a bit like venturing into the deepest jungle where you find these strange caricatures. When the whole point of theatre is that it’s for everybody, that it should be accessible without dumbing anything down, Theatre is about transformation, about taking an ordinary event and making it extraordinary before an audience’s eyes.”

On graduating, Hall had moved to New York, where for several years he tried to write a “great important play” before realising, with the aid of distance, that all the inspiration he needed lay in his childhood, that he needed to own his history. Back in Newcastle, driving through old pit villages with their closed mines and grassed-over slag heaps, he was struck by what he’s called “the cultural cleansing of the entire area”.

But the artistic richness of the lives of working people hit home too: “I grew up with a folk music tradition that wasn’t about class or being professional. You’d go to some incredible session and the best Irish piper would be a bus driver from Leeds. Nothing stops an ordinary person from being brilliant at art. Virtuosity can be anybody’s.”

Hall began his career writing for radio: a 1995 play I Luv You Jimmy Spud, which he later adapted into a stage play, which then became the 2001 film Gabriel and Me starring Billy Connolly and Iain Glen. It told of a bullied loner from Newcastle’s Byker Wall estate — which features a long, unbroken block of 620 maisonettes — who dreams of becoming an angel.

Hall’s deft balancing of philosophical themes with pathos and humour, delivered for the most part by salty, tell-it-like-it-is characters, became his calling card. Also a radio play, 1997’s Spoonface Steinberg was a dramatic monologue by a young autistic Jewish girl with terminal cancer that was subsequently voted among the 10 best radio plays ever by readers of the magazine Radio Times; a TV play and a one-woman West End show followed. His 1999 comedy Cooking With Elvis — also written for radio, then the stage — concerned an Elvis Presley impersonator paralysed in a car crash. “The Tyneside comedy that propelled Lee Hall to the big time,” wrote The Guardian of a revival at the Live Theatre in Newcastle in 2013.

Bigger still, with a run at London’s National Theatre and another on Broadway, was 2008’s The Pitmen Painters, a 1930s-set play about a group of miners from Ashington, Northumberland (as documented in William Feaver’s 1988 book about the Ashington Group), who decide to learn about art and begin to paint. Feted by critics and the public and exhibited in London, the newly famous group stays put, enriching the lives of their friends and families.

“I was interested in stories of people who might have achieved fame or success but didn’t leave their communities. This was a real story of people who were celebrated but kept on working because they saw this as their connection to themselves and the world, which they felt would be fractured if it was taken away.”

A pause. “The other thing about theatre which is celebrated in this play, and in plays like Shakespeare in Love, is that it’s something you can’t do alone. Theatre is something that’s alive and shared and done as a group. If the characters are ordinary people, and if the audience gets to have a bit of a laugh and a bit of a cry, there’s really nothing better.”

Gwyneth Paltrow in the film version of Shakespeare in Love

The self-effacing Hall is only too aware of his privileged boy-made-good position, of being of ordinary stock while owning a large house in Islington, the postcode of many a so-called champagne socialist. His steadfast connection to his roots is palpable, nonetheless: “I always feel there is something akin between Australians and people from Newcastle because of this lack of pretension and willingness to tell it like it is,” he says, winningly. “Culturally we’re not so different.”

On the coffee table between us are books on Homer’s Odyssey, and the latest work by British nature writer Robert McFarlane. A voracious reader (“I have an insatiable appetite for all things cultural”), Hall is forever on the lookout for stories that spark his imagination. Indeed, it was AJ Cronin’s 1935 novel The Stars Look Down, the tale of an English coal miner’s son in a mining town during a strike, that led to the writing of Billy Elliot, whose motherless 11-year-old protagonist falls in love with ballet during the infamous 1984 miners’ strike, to the chagrin of his peers and family.

Hall turned the screenplay into a stage musical, adding more heart and politics (including a feel-good singalong pre-empting the passing of Thatcher) and writing lyrics to music written by his friend, Elton John. It was Elton who suggested the idea of a musical and he’d baulked, he says, having long thought the form too middle class, too middle-of-the-road. Along the way the superstar asked Hall to consider writing a screenplay about his life: “So I wrote the original script (for Rocketman) in 2003, and it’s taken all this time to come about.”

Hall has written about 18 treatments that haven’t yet been made, including versions of Pink Floyd The Wall (stage), George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London (stage) and Hippie Hippie Shake (screen), the memoir by the late Australian commentator, Richard Neville. And while this may or may not feel like a waste of creativity, there was also his screenplay for War Horse, which he adapted for Steven Spielberg only for it to be rewritten by Richard Curtis then rewritten again. While Hall’s name is on the credits, he sincerely wishes it wasn’t.

He is in the very early stages of writing a stage musical about the life of Bob Marley, reggae’s own Wordsworth, having long come around to the fact that musicals, too, should be for everybody. Which brings us back to Shakespeare in Love, which he says has a musical’s aesthetic: “The ‘numbers’ are the amazing chunks of Shakespearean poetry, and there’s a whole world of music (by Paddy Cunneen) that has been brilliantly woven in, just as it would have been in Shakespeare’s theatre, where the magic is also in your imagination.”

Shakespeare’s populist approach made his work profound for everybody: “One of the great things about him was the way he took a bare stage and had the actors come on and make you believe that a common player can be a Queen, boys can be girls, that the miraculous can be made from the mundane. So in Shakespeare in Love we get another layer of truth by seeing the ways in which he went about doing this, how this ordinary bloke invented himself as a writer.” Hall flashes a grin. “I think it’s fair to say he didn’t do too badly in the end.”

Shakespeare in Love opens on Friday at Arts Centre, Melbourne.