A ripping yarn so outrageous it's actually true

Lee Hall sounds like a very happy man. Even before the stage musical version of his 1999 screenplay Billy Elliot scooped a staggering 10 Tony awards on Broadway, Hall sounds positively chuffed with how things have worked out.

Lee Hall sounds like a very happy man. Even before the stage musical version of his 1999 screenplay Billy Elliot scooped a staggering 10 Tony awards on Broadway out of the 16 it was nominated for, inspiring a swathe of "The Brits are coming" type articles in their wake, Hall sounds positively chuffed with how things have worked out. It's not hard to see why. After all, how many other working class boys from the north-east of England have scored such a long-term international success with a work that has the starting point of the ill-starred 1984 miners' strike that ravaged communities, chalking up a major victory for the Thatcherite Conservative government in the process?

Hall has always been one for marrying a populist streak with quirkier leftfield fare. Take Cooking With Elvis, a black farce which premiered in Edinburgh the same year Billy Elliot began to take on the world, and is now set to receive a major summer revival at Glasgow's Tron Theatre. Originally brought to life as a radio play, Cooking With Elvis centres around a wheelchair-bound Elvis Presley impersonator, his alcoholic, anorexic and sex-starved spouse, their cook book fixated teenage daughter and their lover. As dysfunctionally Ortonesque as Hall's most outrageous yarn sounds, the roots of the story, it seems, are embedded in truth.

"I came up with ideas for a lot of things all at once," Hall remembers of the play's origins, "and they were all in some way about growing up in Newcastle. With Cooking With Elvis, I knew a family who this actually happened to, where the father was paraplegic after an accident, so I know the play seems pretty extreme at times, but a lot of it actually comes from a true story. I was living in New York with an American girlfriend at the time, and when you go away it's weird trying to explain these stories of what its like growing up in the north-east of England. I've always felt there's a particular sensibility about hardship and robustness, but there's a lot of care and love as well. So I was having fun coming from an alien land then, but writing about it was very gratifying."

It seems 1999 was a hugely significant year for Hall. As well as Cooking With Elvis wowing Edinburgh, a stage version of another radio play, Spoonface Steinberg, appeared featuring Kathryn Hunter in the title role, and another play, I Luv You Jimmy Spud, was also produced. There was also the small matter of Billy Elliot, which, in Stephen Daldry's film version of Hall's story about a boy who transcends his backstreet origins to become a ballet dancer, set down a template for a slew of similarly styled British films that followed in its wake.

"I remember when Cooking With Elvis was doing Edinburgh," Hall says, "and I used to go down to see them shooting Billy Elliot, then go back up and hang around the Assembly Rooms. The two works are intimately connected. Especially when you're younger and you start writing, and these things just churn out. It gets harder as you go on, because you realise you have more responsibility, both to directors poring over your work and to audiences. But I always call Billy Elliot a fantasy. I don't dance, but when I was a boy, I spent hours and hours going to drama clubs after school."

It was in these clubs that Hall first tapped into both his populist and political sensibilities by what sounds like a quiet form of entryism by his teachers.

"In those days," Hall remembers, "local councils used to pay for these drama clubs, which, to be honest were quite political. They were run by a lot of teachers who'd been hippies and were educated, and then applied all that to theatre. In lots of the work we did there we were encouraged to draw from our own experience, so when I began to write, I naturally looked to the same sorts of things to write about. But I wasn't just writing in a garret. There were four of us making this stuff up, and even today I'm still working with the same guys as I was in third year at school. So we've all done it together. We've all made the same journey."

Given Hall's stressing of his collectivist approach, it should come as no surprise to learn where his main theatrical influences came from beyond school drama clubs.

"Political theatre and 7:84," Hall says, "That's what I grew up with, and when we decided to do Billy Elliot onstage, I knew I wanted to make a musical in that vein."

The contribution of a score by Elton John, a man not exactly renowned for radical gestures, may not have been an obvious choice for a collaborator. But then, neither was taking a miners' strike-set musical to Broadway and making a smash hit of it. As sentimental a story as it is, though, Hall felt no need to soft soap the show's political leanings.

"As a play it speaks about what's going on in the world right now," Hall maintains. "So instead of softening up the politics for Billy Elliot on Broadway, we toughened them up. American audiences and audiences in general are hungry for things that have some integrity, whether they agree with what it's saying or not. And let's not forget that there's a whole radical tradition of American writing going back to John Steinbeck and beyond that looks at working class life and the depression. Whether American audiences know the specifics about the north-east or about the 1984 miners' strike doesn't entirely matter. What does matter is that they recognised a play about the big boot of capitalism kicking the little folk. Growing up with 7:84, it's good to take a little bit of that into the play, especially now, when we're in such a similar situation."

Cooking With Elvis has little to do with such political sentiments, as Hall is the first to admit.

"Cooking With Elvis is the one play that's different,' he says. "It's very working class, but also remember that I was in New York when I was writing it and was being exposed to very different kinds of theatre, so it ended up as this unholy mix of Brian Rix, Mike Leigh and The Wooster Group."

The success of Billy Elliot and everything else that came out of 1999 for Hall has clearly opened doors for him. Translations of Brecht and Goldoni, a screenplay of Pride and Prejudice and a TV version of The Wind in The Willows have all been met with acclaim. As has too his 2008 stage play, The Pitmen Painters, which saw Hall get back to his roots, both in terms of subject matter and in keeping things local. Inspired by a book by art critic William Feaver, the play looks at a group of Northumberland miners who decide to learn about art. The play opened the refurbished Live Theatre in Newcastle before transferring to the National. Hall is also working on a version of Pink Floyd's The Wall with former Floyd guitarist Roger Waters.

"I've written about 20 film scripts over the last 10 years," Hall says, "for everyone from Spielberg to Disney, and most of it will never see the light of day. But what it does do is free you up financially to be able to get on with the next thing. Billy Elliot took years to get on, and I think that helps you keep your feet on the ground. It's also allowed me the time to work with people I admire, the right people, rather than just do something to pay the rent."