Lee Hall: 'I will fight this'

Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall has spent the past year working on an epic opera starring 300 schoolchildren. Now his backers have pulled out, in a bitter row over a character's sexuality

(The Guardian) -- For the past year I have been working on the libretto for my next project, a community opera in Bridlington by composer Harvey Brough, commissioned by Opera North. The opera, which was due to premiere on 15 July, takes place over a day on the beach. All human life is there: kids on a school trip, grannies with sandwiches, dog lovers, holiday makers, even a landscape painter. It is Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring meets Death in Venice, drawn by Donald McGill.

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But by last week, we had reached an impasse. The opera's main character is a gay, retired painter, and in one scene he is the victim of taunting. At the school's request, I agreed to tone down the violence of the language in this scene, but not the character's straightforward defence of his sexuality. Word came back from Opera North that, unless I removed the lines "I'm queer" and "I prefer a lad to a lass", the whole project was in jeopardy. (It was by now far too late to replace 300 schoolchildren.)

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What I find bizarre is the insistence that no one – not the school, not Opera North, not the local education authority – is being homophobic. Instead, we have the strange position that, because the children are of primary-school age, these lines are too difficult and confusing for them. It feels to me that, because I was unwilling to remove these lines, the opera's chance of taking place has vanished. The whole project has cost well over £100,000, and has involved hundreds of people and thousands of hours of writing, composing and rehearsing. That a play about tolerance, community and civic values could founder over this seems unbelievable.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/jul/03/lee-hall-opera-north