Culture and the Working Class: Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters

Abstract

Abstract In his work as a playwright, Lee Hall not only explores dramatically the troubled relationship between culture and the working class in Britain. He also seeks to challenge the stereotyped images of the working class in the media as being feckless, inarticulate and incapable of engaging in any cultural production on their own terms. In this paper I examine the ways in which this encounter between the working class and ‘high art’ is depicted in the film Billy Elliot (2000) and the play The Pitmen Painters (2008), both written by Lee Hall. In these portrayals of a working-class boy’s struggle to become a ballet dancer and of the collective efforts of a group of coal miners to express themselves as fine artists, I discuss how far Hall has succeeded in subverting received working-class stereotypes and what are the broader political and aesthetic implications of his cultural depictions of these coal-mining communities.