Review: Billy Elliot at Koorliny Arts Centre

Billy Elliot at Koorliny Arts Centre, Kwinana
Sunday, March 22, 2026

Koorliny Arts Centre, in collaboration with the City of Kwinana, proudly brought to their stage Billy Elliot for its West Australian amateur premiere. A tale of childhood self-discovery set against the unremitting grimness of the 1984 UK miners’ strike, the story was heartwarming yet also strikingly unabashed when tackling the harder political and cultural edges of that time.

An adaptation of the turn-of-the-millennium movie, with music by Elton John and lyrics by original screenwriter Lee Hall, Billy Elliot had a decade-long run on London’s West End and made it four years on Broadway, in 2009 winning ten Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Tonight’s audience filed into the theatre to archival news footage from South Yorkshire, the screen full of police and miners in bitter stand-offs, cars aflame, properties vandalised, and the clipped accents of journalists reporting as if from a war zone. In the very middle of the stage, back to the audience, near enough joined with them watching the family television, was tonight’s Billy Elliot himself, Lucas Johnson.

When staying late at the local community hall after a boxing lesson, Billy discovered the ballet that next inhabited the venue, and, with the lightness on his feet already identified as a pugilist, grew more into himself under the watchful tutelage of Mrs Wilkinson. What began as a half-hearted lark for Billy quickly became a passion—one that, by bitter necessity, remained for the most part hidden.

For this was the mid-Eighties in the North, where traditional gender roles were adhered to; Kenny Everett and Liberace were straight, with any form of flamboyance looked askance at and often strictly repressed. Add in the miners’ strike, the regular clashes with the police, a quite dysfunctional family, and the dramatic tension often teased out sparingly in these tales was already near full-on display.

Johnson as the lead was a marvel. Just turned twelve years old during last week’s final rehearsals, he held most of the structure of the entire piece on his slim shoulders. He excelled in all performance aspects asked of him, and in song, dance, and the scripted acting, he showed himself very much the fabled triple threat. Somewhat astonishing to note that this was his first theatre role outside a school production, Johnson easily held his own with every adult cast member he shared the stage with tonight. If he wishes to continue this acting path, Perth can surely look forward to many great performances in the years ahead.

With one of the cores of the story being the relationship between Billy and his teacher, Melissa Kelly as Mrs Wilkinson near enough earned equal billing. A vivacious force of nature as soon as she entered the first ballet class scene, Kelly showcased her character’s boundless empathy, white-hot assertiveness, care and pride for both her students and her community. We Were Born to Boogie, a triple hander between Johnson, Kelly, and Jason Nettle’s fabulously camp Mr Braithwaite, was an easy highlight towards the end of Act One.

Daniel Burton as Billy’s dad Jackie and Thomas Dimmick as older brother Tony both performed strongly as they brought some of the sharper edges of the material to the fore. Part one, family mutely mourning the death of a wife and mother; and part two, men with very different ideas of what constituted acceptable strike action, and both initially reacted with vehement shock at Billy’s emerging life passion.

This may be the best place to note that the script as presented had aspects of bigotry, homophobia, a degree of misogyny, and simmering violence. As a period piece, however, the performance rang true; the lines were of their time, no matter how jarring to 2026 ears those words and phrases were. Indeed, Lindsay McNab as Grandma sang quite beautifully on a very dark topic, her character’s thirty-year marriage to an unrepentant alcoholic.

Perhaps the most joyful scene out of the entire production and another easy highlight to cheer for would be Expressing Yourself, as performed by Johnson and Jaxon Reuben—the latter of whom near enough stole the entire stage with an outrageously charismatic turn as flamboyant extrovert Michael, one of Billy’s best friends and ragingly queer.

The scene started quietly enough as the boys experimented with beginner drag before turning ever more absurdist and surreal, with tap dancing, glitter, and finally an entire chorus line of inanimate objects bursting from the wings. All this while, the track lyrics preached self-love and self-acceptance in the best possible way.

The staging was compact, yet expanded the performance space in innovative ways, easily switching from kitchen and bedroom through a community hall even to a mine shaft. At several points the company wandered amongst the audience, even breaking the fourth wall for a Christmas panto at the start of Act Two. The choreography was also wonderful, especially during Solidarity, when the police, strikers, and ballet class were all on stage at the same time, dancing to their own distinct but interwoven rhythms.

Billy Elliot as presented tonight was a triumph. From front of house to the very back, all aspects of the performance were brought forward with a high degree of panache and a sense of love, passion, and commitment for both the story on stage and the work it entailed beyond.

With Billy Elliot, Koorliny and City of Kwinana continue to provide thoughtful, quality theatre for the southern suburbs, and it comes as little surprise the rest of this season is already sold out.

PAUL MEEK