Stephen Daldry’s 2000 film, Billy Elliot, was a phenomenon of its time. 

Tapping into the seemingly bottomless well of the Thatcher reign, it set the aspirations of a working-class boy against the background of the 1980s miners’ strike in northeast England.

Now Free Rain Theatre, with Jarrad West as director, is launching into Billy Elliot the Musical in an era when most of the performers have never even heard of Maggie Thatcher. 

The enduring power of the show can be put down in part to Lee Hall’s original script and in part to the snazzy music of Elton John, who wrote all the numbers for the musical show that followed in 2005. The top team of Katrina Tang and Caleb Campbell as musical directors means that’s all in hand. 

Choreographer Michelle Heine has been grappling with an enormous document that dictates the moves to replicate the West End and Broadway productions. 

“It’s like McDonald’s, you have to make everything look roughly the same,” she tells me. 

But in amateur productions without multilevel sets or the capacity to fly characters, “as much as replicated as possible, but there’s a little bit of licence.”

The titular role of Billy Elliot is shared by Mitchell Clement, from Queanbeyan, and Fergus Paterson, from Newcastle, since the law requires double casting for the young people in the show.

Clement, 14 years old and in year 9 at Karabar High School, is “our” Billy.

He’s been studying contemporary, tap and ballet at Eden Dance Academy in Crestwood since he was six or seven,” he tells me, and says: “I’ve done a little bit of singing and acting at school, but I’m more heavily trained in dance.

“I did receive some bullying during my primary school, but my parents were really very good to talk to about it.

 ‘What I enjoy so much about dancing is that I’m able to express how I feel.” 

That’s maybe why his favourite song in the show is “Expressing Yourself”.

He’s busy learning the North Country accent from a list of words, but says: “It’s easy to become Billy, it’s quite natural to act the part and the Elton John songs help… once I’ve learned them they get stuck in my head.”

Joe Dinn, who plays Jackie, Billy’s widowed father, performed in European productions of Priscilla: The Musical for many of his nearly 20 years overseas before his return during covid; he now acts by night and works in marketing at the Canberra Theatre Centre by day. 

From Priscilla to rough miner is a big leap for him. 

As for the Thatcher component, he agrees most young kids have no idea who she was, but says every character is real, as we see when the community tries to push Billy into the way young men are supposed to be, while he dreams only of dance. 

“In the opening act I’m kind of the villain,” Dinn says. “But in the second half I come to realise that dancing might well be Billy’s ticket out of town.”

There’s even a parallel in his own life. His parents tried to push him into sport but found him tap-dancing in his soccer shoes instead. And in a delicious “full-circle event”, Heine was his own very encouraging dance teacher when he was young. 

Dinn praises Clement, who is, he says, “a Queanbeyan-trained dancer, who’s learning to act and sing – it’s like having to play Hamilton as a boy.” 

Lachlan Elderton, who plays Billy’s older brother Tony, is about to turn 19, exactly the right age for the show’s angry, industrial activist and boxer.

Although he has a regular gig in burlesque shows at Templo Theatre in Civic, he says: “I can hold my own, but I wouldn’t say I was a dancer.”

“Tony is a challenging role. You’d think it would be easy to be angry all the time, but being young, it’s hard to be in character and remember I’m Lachlan at the end of the day.”

The big showstopper is the 10-minute number, Solidarity, where the miners have to dance with little ballet girls who are so much better than they are. 

He, too, has nothing but praise for Clement, whom he knew at Karabar High School.

“When he turned up at auditions for the show he was only a dancer, and now he’s the triple threat,” he says. 

Billy Elliot the Musical, The Q, April 9-May 5.