Culture and the Working Class: Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters
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.
Works Cited
Feaver, William (2009). Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934–1984. Ashington: Ashington Group Trustees Publishers.Suche in Google Scholar
Hall, Lee (2000a). Billy Elliot. London: Faber and Faber.Suche in Google Scholar
Hall, Lee (2000b). Billy Elliot. Dir. Stephen Daldry. Prod. Greg Brenman. UK: Universal Studios.Suche in Google Scholar
Hall, Lee (2000c). “Introduction.” Billy Elliot. London: Faber and Faber, vii–x.Suche in Google Scholar
Hall, Lee (2003). “Introduction.” Live Theatre: Six Plays from the North East. ed. Max Roberts. London: Methuen Drama, xi–xv.Suche in Google Scholar
Hall, Lee (2008a). The Pitmen Painters. London: Faber and Faber.10.5040/9780571293711.00000007Suche in Google Scholar
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McManners, Robert and Gillian Wales (2002). Shafts of Light: Mining Art in the Great Northern Coalfield. Bishop Auckland: Gemini Productions.Suche in Google Scholar
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©2016 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- “And am I thus Rewarded?” The Rejected Hero and the Raped Heroine in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim
- Deceptive Signification: Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, and Eighteenth-Century Hermit Discourse
- Culture and the Working Class: Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters
- Saroyan’s Travel Memories: Contesting National Identities for Armenian-Americans
- The Relevance of Ideology in Reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden in Slovenia
- Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound – Contacts, Contests and Translations
- Book Reviews
- Die Stadt, der Highway und die Kamera: Fotografie und Urbanisierung in New York zwischen 1945 und 1965
- Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict.
- The Soul in British Romanticism: Negotiating Human Nature in Philosophy, Science, and Poetry
- A Short Literary History of the United States
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 64 (2016)
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Editorial
- Articles
- “And am I thus Rewarded?” The Rejected Hero and the Raped Heroine in Mary Pix’s Ibrahim
- Deceptive Signification: Walter Scott, Ivanhoe, and Eighteenth-Century Hermit Discourse
- Culture and the Working Class: Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters
- Saroyan’s Travel Memories: Contesting National Identities for Armenian-Americans
- The Relevance of Ideology in Reading Steinbeck’s East of Eden in Slovenia
- Postcolonial Ekphrasis and Counter-Visions in Derek Walcott’s Tiepolo’s Hound – Contacts, Contests and Translations
- Book Reviews
- Die Stadt, der Highway und die Kamera: Fotografie und Urbanisierung in New York zwischen 1945 und 1965
- Lincoln’s Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and Moral Conflict.
- The Soul in British Romanticism: Negotiating Human Nature in Philosophy, Science, and Poetry
- A Short Literary History of the United States
- Books Received
- Table of Contents Vol. 64 (2016)
