Stephen Daldry’s 2000 film Billy Elliot was a Bafta-winning critical and commercial hit. His 2005 stage musical version of the story about a working-class boy who wants to be a ballet dancer has been seen by 11 million people. His production of An Inspector Calls, JB Priestley’s thriller of social conscience, has scooped armfuls of awards and is the National Theatre’s longest-running show.
Wondrously, both stage shows are still going strong today, with the touring production of Priestley’s 70-year-old drama about a mystery visitor who unravels a family’s secrets returning to the West End next month. It is now the longest-running revival in theatrical history. Yet any suggestion that Daldry has become a phenomenon akin to Andrew Lloyd Webber, an impresario who maintains a fleet of enduring stage hits in a variety of venues, is not welcome. Daldry wants to be more troublesome, less mainstream, than that.
Next month he will have another go at rocking the cultural boat. Not content with an esteemed career in the world of film, making The Hours and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, or a recent theatrical triumph on both sides of the Atlantic with The Audience, the play with Helen Mirren as the Queen, the 56-year-old has now created the most expensive television drama of all time – and possibly the most ambitious.
The Crown, telling the story of Elizabeth II from 1947 to the present day, will launch on 4 November on Netflix and has already been hailed by critics as the television drama series that will blast through established viewing habits, drawing older audiences away from traditional channels. Awarded five stars by reviewers on the Times and the Telegraph, it is a forensic examination of the politics and personal dramas negotiated by the royal family and, at a rumoured cost of £100m, marks the American subscription service’s big push into new audiences. “They are expanding, both in the number of people who are subscribing, and into territories like Australia and India. I assume that is why they responded to our request,” said Daldry. One of the “great joys”, he adds, of working for Netflix is the creative freedom. “There were no anxieties in the area of editorial control, not that we set out to do a hatchet job on the royal family by any stretch of the imagination.”
The atmosphere at the production’s Elstree base has been close to a backstage theatrical experience, he says, puffing cigarette smoke enthusiastically over the roof of the Young Vic theatre in London, where he is advising on Isango Ensemble’s new show, A Man of Good Hope. “Netflix have been a fantastic company to work for. I have never been in a more convivial and happy production team. There are no commercial breaks for viewers and they don’t tell us how long to make the thing either.”
Whether The Crown is the show that changes the game or not, Daldry believes subscription television is the likely future of entertainment: “Who wants to got to the cinema on a Friday night now? You might get certain break-out movies, but online streaming of drama has altered the whole thing. You can subscribe and see 40 TV shows, or go out to the cinema for a night for the same money.”
Daldry might seem like a creative nomad, moving on from one medium and from one theme to another, but it is possible to spot the social concerns that crop up in his work. Both Priestley’s morality puzzle and The Crown are rooted in postwar Britain. Although the play is set before the first world war, it was first performed in London at the New Theatre, now the Noël Coward, at the moment the young Princess Elizabeth was preparing for marriage. It is an era the director says he finds hard to view as a “period” setting. Instead, he says that both the venerable stage play and his new television series, written by Peter Morgan, strive to represent the real world we live in, rather than a past where “they do things differently”.
“Neither of them are really like costume dramas,” Daldry says. “With The Crown we are attentive to detail, but it is not one of those dramas where you look at the dresses. I hope it doesn’t feel like one of those.” As with An Inspector Calls, the issues in The Crown feel contemporary, to say nothing of the bad language (the King swears at full throttle in the first five minutes) or of the focus on gritty subjects such as Anthony Eden’s drug addiction.
Daldry says he does not watch costume drama. “I don’t know why. I am not knocking it. I haven’t seen ITV’s Victoria yet. I did try to watch Downton on an aeroplane, but it is not really my thing.”
What he does find interesting, he says, is the anthropology of class, of royalty and of the church.
“Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls as part of that huge shift in postwar consensus, the wakening of a social conscience. He wrote it as political agitation, so people would not go back to Edwardian values, and when we first did it Margaret Thatcher was talking about returning to prewar values. Whenever you watch the play it seems to be politically relevant. It feels urgent in different ways. I first intended the chorus who come on carrying bundles to be the people of 1945, but when we did it in Dartford at the beginning of the year they suddenly looked like dispossessed refugees.”
It is odd revisiting a show he directed 24 years ago, Daldry says. “I am now in my late 50s and am wondering whether I would do the audacious risk-taking now.” He wonders if he might have been harder on the royals then: “I have more respect because I know so much more now. Who knew Prince Philip (played by Matt Smith ) was a radical reformer who really did want to modernise them?”
Morgan and Daldry’s original idea, born of their work on The Audience, was to “continue the study of a family that weren’t born to be the royal family of England and look at all the tensions and trials they go through”. Daldry found it extraordinary just how much of their lives were discussed in cabinet sessions. “Our rule was that the TV show would be about everything that became a constitutional crisis, not just the aborted engagement of Princess Margaret, but it broadened out a bit. We have fantastic researchers on the show, but we have deliberately had no contact with the palace. We always know when we are departing from the absolute truth, and of course no one knows the dialogue, so what you get of course is an imaginative interpretation. Peter describes it as The Sopranos meets The West Wing.”
Daldry, as may now be evident, is busy. With 10 episodes of the first season of The Crown made, he is working on season two in Hungary, where Budapest will stand in for Germany and viewers will meet Prince Philip’s family (many married to Nazis).
Aside from the Young Vic show, and the work with the three new cast members joining An Inspector Calls for the West End run, he is in New York frequently. Not only do his children go to school there, he is working on two high-profile arts building projects, Pier 55 and the new performance centre on the site of Ground Zero. He has also just returned from a UN assembly “global exchange” session, which he attended with fellow members of the board of the Good Chance theatre company, working with people in the Calais refugee camp.
Rather than being overstretched, Daldry is, he claims, “thrilled by all the connections” he sees in his varied projects. While the play at the Young Vic deals with the violent reaction to the Somali refugee crisis in South Africa, the director is also working in a climate heavily weighted with reaction to refugees who have flown in the other direction, north to Europe. “At the moment Billy Elliot is getting an incredible response in Edinburgh when the show talks about the collapse of community or the attack on union rights. People yell out. I love it when An Inspector Calls feels radical too. Sometimes people applaud in unexpected places.”
Finding quite such a radical resonance in his next film project, Wicked: The Movie, may be a bigger ask, but Daldry may well try.
THE TOP FIVE
An Inspector Calls 1992
Daldry’s production of Priestley’s play for the National Theatre is still going. Due back in the West End next month, it won three Olivier awards and then four Tony awards on Broadway and has since broken records for a stage revival
Billy Elliot 2000
Lee Hall’s screenplay, directed by Daldry, became a hit film and made the boy from the threatened mining community who wanted to dance a household name. It starred newcomer Jamie Bell, with Julie Walters as his teacher
The Hours 2002
Daldry’s film of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer-winning novel about the lives of three women, including Virginia Woolf, earned Nicole Kidman an Oscar. It also starred Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep. (His 2008 film The Reader also earned an Oscar for Kate Winslet)
Billy Elliot The Musical 2005
The story took a new form onstage when coupled with music by Elton John. It won five Olivier awards and 10 Tonys, and has now been seen by 11 million people
The Olympic ceremonies 2012
Daldry was an executive producer of the opening and closing ceremonies of both the Olympics and Paralympics, working with expert concert producer the late Mark Fisher, and appointing the artistic directors
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