Stephen Daldry Research Articles

Introduction: Divo worship

Stephen Daldry’s Billy Elliot (2000), a British film about a boy from the industrial north-east who forsakes his roots to train as a professional dancer, opens and closes with two almost mythic scenes of male dancing. In the first, the film’s opening, the eleven-year-old Billy lays the stylus on a T-Rex LP and, after a scratchy false start, the soundtrack begins with the 1978 ‘Cosmic Dancer’. Hopping onto his bed, Billy starts to leap up and down – first as any boy would, but then higher and higher, his body caught in slow motion in a variety of abstract poses. In the film’s final scene, we return to Billy dancing, this time as a mature, muscular adult arriving in the wings of a London theatre. This is the first and only time we see the grown-up Billy, and his face is kept from us so that we can focus on the strength and immensity of his limbs, the astonishing athletic body. At the climactic statement of a soaring late Romantic phrase – the music is now Swan Lake – Billy leaps onto the stage. Boy becomes man, adolescent energy is transformed into athleticism and film and soundtrack freeze, capturing Billy in another abstract leap.

WRITERS AND BIOGRAPHICAL CINEMA

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Sylvia, written by John Brownlow and directed by Christine Jeffs, is a BBC Films, Capitol Films, UK Film Council and Focus Features film. The Hours, directed by Stephen Daldry and written by David Hare, was adapted from Michael Cunningham's novel by the same title, and released by Mirimax Films and Paramount Pictures. Iris, directed by Richard Eyre with a screenplay by Richard Eyre and Charles Wood, is based on the memoirs of John Bayley, Iris Murdoch's husband, and is a BBC Films, Intermedia and Miramax film. 2. From Sylvia Plath's poem ‘The Moon and the Yew Tree’ in Ariel (1968, 47). 3. When referring to The Hours I am referring specifically to the Virginia Woolf narrative. 4. In my discussion, ‘Virginia Woolf, ‘Sylvia Plath’ and ‘Iris Murdoch’ refer to the characters as represented in these films, while ‘Woolf, ‘Plath’ and ‘Murdoch’ refer to the historical women writers. 5. For an historical discussion of constructions of male and female in Western philosophy from Classical to Modern times see Genevieve Lloyd's The Man of Reason (1984 Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The man of reason, London: Methuen. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 6. Hermione Lee also discusses the use of sedatives as a method in the treatment of neurasthenia (1999, 179). 7. This quotation from an interview with Virginia Virginia Woolf Listserve . 2004 . Posted by S. Shulman on 7 July . Available from VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu . Accessed 8 July 2004 . [Google Scholar] Nicolson published in The Independent, 7 July 2004, was obtained from the Virginia Woolf listserve, VWOOLF@lists.acs.ohio-state.edu, posted by S. Shulman on 7 July 2004. 8. For a discussion of cultural interpretations and responses to shell-shock during and following the First World War see Joanne Bourke's Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1996 Bourke, Joanne. 1996. Dismembering the male: Men's bodies, Britain, and the Great War, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [Google Scholar], 107–23) and Showalter (1985, chap. 7). 9. On the first occasion, the morning after an argument with Ted Hughes, she apologizes for her behaviour, explaining that she was very ‘tired’ and that she has reorganized her teaching duties so that she ‘won't be quite so tired’. The second scene in which she alludes to her fatigue is when Assia and David Wevill visit the Hughes in Devon, by which time they have two children. As her real desire for the Wevill's departure is due to her suspicions about Assia's relations with Ted Hughes, her claims to exhaustion could be read as the excuses of an irrationally suspicious woman; ‘I'd like you and Assia to leave in the morning. It's just that I'm tired, so tired. And, you don't know what I've been through. I have two small children. If you had children of your own you'd understand’ (Sylvia 2003 Sylvia . 2003 . Directed by Christine Jeffs. BBC Films, Capitol Films, UK Film Council and Focus Features . [Google Scholar]). 10. See the ‘Synopsis’ in the ‘About the Film’ link on the Sylvia official website (http://www.sylviamovie.com). 11. In her introduction to Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (1996 Beer, Gillian. 1996. Virginia Woolf: The common ground, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. [Google Scholar]), Gillian Beer discusses how, in both her fiction and non-fiction, Woolf seeks to democratize historical, scientific and philosophical theory and discourse by relocating them within the space of ordinary, non-academic thought and experience. For other investigations into the role of the ordinary, habitual and everyday in Woolf's philosophy and aesthetics see Liesl M. Olson (2002 Olson, L.iesl M. 2002. 3. Virginia Woolf's ‘cotton wool of daily life’. Journal of Modern Literature, 26(2): 42–65. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]/3), and Lorraine Sim (2005a Sim, Lorraine. 2005a. Virginia Woolf tracing patterns through Plato's forms. Journal of Modern Literature, 28(2): 38–48. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).

The Performing Northern Working Class in British Cinema: Cultural Representation and its Political Economy

Brassed Off (Mark Herman, 1996), The Full Monty (Peter Cattaneo, 1997), Little Voice (Mark Herman, 1998) and Billy Elliot (Stephen Daldry, 2000) are a cluster of recent British films which represen...

Boys, Class and Gender: from Billy Casper to Billy Elliot

The film Billy Elliot (dir. Stephen Daldry, 2000) brings supposed working-class assumptions about masculinity into confrontation: it is 1984, the miners are on strike and fighting the police, while young Billy has this unfathomable need to be a ballet dancer. ‘It's not just poofs, Dad’, he insists. What is scarcely questioned is the conventional gendering of ballet as feminine. Billy Elliot alludes purposefully to Kes (dir. Ken Loach, 1969), which presents another boy, Billy Caspar, with an aptitude and an obsession that marks him out in an industrial working-class town. The two films offer specifically different stories about class, the state, gender and agency. Elliot's individual talent removes him to London in a consolatory fantasy of personal escape. For Caspar and his like there is no idea of leaving Barnsley; the viewer is left to intuit prospects for changing it. The two films are separated by distinct attitudes toward social transformation. As Cora Kaplan remarks, in the mid seventies many on the left took it for granted that significant new advances were possible. That is difficult in the present context.

Naturalism, Poetic Realism, Spectacle: Wesker's ‘The Kitchen’ in Performance

When Stephen Daldry took over the artistic directorship of the Royal Court in 1994, the first play he chose to direct was a revival of one of the great successes of the theatre's early occupancy by the English Stage Company, Arnold Wesker's The Kitchen. In the following article, Stephen Lacey sees this as in part a defining statement of Daldry's own relationship to the theatre and its traditions, and he offers a detailed comparison between Daldry's production and John Dexter's original in 1959, as revived in 1961. Exploring in particular the directors' – and the designers' – differing perceptions of the elements of naturalism and theatricality which co-exist in the play, he also contrasts Dexter's end-on use of the Court's picture-frame stage with Daidry's reconstruction of the theatre to provide an in-the-round ambience. This, he suggests, is emblematic of a new relationship not only between the play and its audience, but of changed perceptions between the 'fifties and the 'nineties concerning the nature and potential of social realism in the theatre.