Rupert Goold and Richard Bean interview: ‘We didn't really know how musicals worked’

The British musical is in crisis. The British musical is often in crisis. But even compared to 2012 – aka The Year Of ‘Viva Forever!’ – 2014 has been unusually crisis-y. New works by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice shut early, ‘We Will Rock You’ finally closed and ‘I Can’t Sing!’, the year’s biggest home-grown show, tanked hard. Doddery revivals of ‘Cats’ and ‘Miss Saigon’ look set to be the biggest Brit hits of the year.

But there is one last hope. ‘Made in Dagenham’ is a very liberal adaptation of the spunky 2010 Britflick of the same name. It concerns the Ford sewing machinists strike of 1968, which did much to advance the cause of equal pay for women in Britain. It is funny, it is political, it’s a bit mad.

Its star is film actress Gemma Arterton, who has never been in a musical before. Its writer is Richard ‘One Man, Two Guvnors’ Bean, who has never written a musical before. Songs are from David Arnold, veteran film composer but also new to the stage. Lyrics come from Richard Thomas, co-writer of the deeply unconventional ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’. And heading the team is Rupert Goold, the left-field showman whose only previous new musical was last year’s bijou oddity ‘American Psycho’.

‘We all met in my office,’ says Goold of accepting the gig, ‘and I got a lot of postcards and a message board and I just started pinning cards with things written on them and said, “Okay, this is how I think musicals work.” I didn’t know anything, really.’

Nobody involved is a Lloyd Webber or a Cameron Mackintosh – and that’s a good thing, because neither of our great musical impresarios has mustered a new hit in over a decade. Goold and Bean most certainly have, with the latter bringing killer gags and a voice of authenticity to the project.

‘I assume the producers would rather have had a woman playwright,’ says the notoriously blunt Bean. ‘But I think I got this gig based on the fact that I was on two official strikes in the early 1970s and worked in a factory with factory women. I had to live on £2 a week strike pay so I know what that was like, and I know that particular lexicon that women in factories had.’

The Essex-set musical is as touching, madcap, left-wing and unapologetically British as our last two great hits, ‘Billy Elliot’ and ‘Matilda’. It’s also funnier than either, thanks largely to Bean inserting an extremely witty – though likely divisive – subplot about the antics of PM Harold Wilson and employment secretary Barbara Castle. But it’s also big-hearted, a little sentimental, and – based on the early preview I saw – should keep packing ’em in for at least as long as the excellent Arterton’s on board as unlikely strike leader Rita O’Grady.

Will it save the British musical in the long run? Probably not: even if it’s a stonking smash-hit, its makers are all too successful and busy doing other things to get together and make a follow-up. But it should hopefully salvage national pride for the year.

’It hasn’t been a great run for the British musical recently,’ notes Goold, ‘and that hasn’t necessarily been to do with quality or this Broadway-ish idea of what a musical is. In my experience all the shows I thought would only run for a few performances did well, and all the ones that I thought were going to be a hit vanished. So who knows? We’ll give it a shot.’

‘Made in Dagenham’ is at the Adelphi Theatre until March 28 2015.