Consuming Authenticities: Billy Elliot the Musical and the Performing Child

Billy Elliot the Musical has enjoyed spectacular success with audiences across the world since it premiered in London’s West End in 2005. Directed by Stephen Daldry, written by Lee Hall, with music and lyrics by Elton John, it opened to wildly enthusiastic reviews, won four Olivier awards, and went on to become a massively successful global product, as the producers exported touring versions of the production to the United States, Canada, Australia, and South Korea. Back in the United Kingdom, the musical has achieved an extraordinary level of ubiquity. During 2010 and 2011 thousands of British children and young people took up the show’s offer to participate in “the most successful British musical of the decade,” through the “Billy Youth Theatre” program, which made specially adapted versions of the script and score available to school and youth groups, and encouraged participation through giving selected groups the chance to perform in showcase “Galas” at the Victoria Palace Theatre in London. The extent to which the film and musical have permeated popular cultural consciousness in the United Kingdom is indicated by the way the British media now feels able to use the moniker “Billy Elliot” as a form of shorthand for young male dancers and talented but disadvantaged children in contexts that have no direct association with the musical or the Billy Elliot film of 2000 on which it is based (Curtis; Keller; Mail Foreign Service).

Unlike the film—which has been subject to substantive critical discussion that has usefully charted the ambiguities and ambivalences of its portrayal of gender, sexuality, and recent British politics (Alderson; Sinfield; Weber)—the stage version has as yet received little by way of critical analysis. This is particularly surprising given its extraordinary success and the fascinating questions that the production raises about the function of the child performer on the twenty-first century stage. This article seeks to fill this critical gap and address these questions, considering how those performances have been received, and how the musical’s creators employed children both on stage and in promotional campaigns. Analysis of these marketing and staging strategies and their reception requires an exploration of the complex relationship between performance and authenticity. I demonstrate that, on the one hand, the production trades upon the idea that it is especially authentic, and makes good on this promise by offering audiences a number of distinct but mutually reinforcing authenticities. It is surprisingly committed to the faithful reproduction of a specific time and place; it displays the undeniable talent of its child performers; and its marketing makes much of the parallels between Billy’s story and the life experiences of these child performers. On the other hand, the show appears profoundly—even brazenly—inauthentic at times. Below I examine this paradox and address the question of why audiences appear to accept and consume the authenticities that Billy Elliot the Musical offers them with such enthusiasm.

This involves entering territory often deemed perilous by academics. The term authenticity is supremely slippery, as well as being over-stretched. Its association with genuineness, honesty, integrity, and uniqueness meant that it was widely adopted as a term of approbation at both ends of the cultural spectrum during the twentieth century. It found a home in existential philosophy, appearing in the work of Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, but was also applied with enthusiasm by the advertising industry. This ubiquity made it vulnerable to theoretical and philosophical attacks upon its capaciousness and its inconsistencies, with Theodor Adorno going as far as to argue in his work The Jargon of Authenticity that existentialism’s use of the term ultimately generated an intellectual environment supportive of fascism.¹ Adorno was also deeply sceptical about whether it is possible to create or experience an authentic artwork in the context of capitalist processes of mass production and consumption (Adorno and Horkheimer). As Phillip Vannini and J. Patrick Williams observe in their introduction to Authenticity in Culture, Self and Society, for Adorno and many other critics, “authenticity is a hook employed either to sell products and services . . . or a hegemonic discourse through which...