Dancing queen

Everybody’s Talking About Jamie opened at the Sheffield Crucible in February for a standard three-week run. The show is based on a BBC documentary, Jamie: Drag Queen at 16, about a working-class lad who attended his school prom in a scarlet frock. Director Jonathan Butterell saw the potential to create a replica Billy Elliot and he brought in two co-writers to turn the material into a comic musical. Word of mouth was excellent and the show received immediate offers for a West End transfer.

The action starts in a Sheffield comp where a class of 16-year-olds are being given career advice by a computer. Blond misfit Jamie is encouraged to train as a forklift-truck driver. But he has other ideas. With his mum’s help he sets off in search of his inner self as a gender-fluid diva. The story falls into two parts. First, Jamie must perform in drag at a local cabaret club. Second, he must gatecrash his end-of-term party dressed as a woman. Technically, these missions are identical. And the second is far less demanding than the first. Which is the wrong way around. Script doctors attest that the hero’s obstacles must increase, not decrease in difficulty. And the script spends too much time with Jamie as he learns the tricks of the trade from a threesome of older trannies, Sandra Bollock, Laika Virgin and Tray Sophisticay.

But this interlude allows the material to transcend Jamie’s story and to become a wider portrait of Sheffield and its just-about-managing classes. Jamie’s mum (Josie Walker) is the show’s emotional core. She struggles to hold her crumbling family together and to protect Jamie from his homophobic dad who has suffered a fit of moral disgust and is ready to start afresh with a woman who will give him a ‘real son’.