North-East-inspired Billy Elliot The Musical is currently taking up a lot of director Stephen Daldry's time. But 12 years ago, it was An Inspector Calls which shot him to fame. Viv Hardwick reports on Daldry's first West End success arriving on Tyneside.

JUST over 12 years ago director, Stephen Daldry - who is about to bring Billy Elliot the Musical to the West End - was desperate to direct a certain J B Priestley play but he couldn't find anyone to hire him.

"I'd done a production of An Inspector Calls in York a few years earlier," he explains "and had got very interested in JB Priestley. I became really hooked on him and the more I read, the more I realised I wanted to put the play on again, but no theatre wanted me, they just kept turning me down. It was only Richard Eyre, who was then running the National Theatre who let me have a go."

His production at the National exploded onto the stage in 1992, was hailed as a revolutionary piece of theatre, won 19 major awards and has become the longest running play in the company's history - and Daldry was the man entrusted to helm multi-million-pound projects like North-East set movie Billy Elliot and the musical follow-up opening at London's Victoria Palace Theatre on March 24.

But next week, his breakthrough play arrives on tour at Newcastle's Tyne Theatre. He smiles at the memory of how frustrated he was that no-one would let him direct it. Working alongside his regulator collaborator, designer Ian MacNeil, the pair created a groundbreaking production. The director wanted to get away from the image of Priestley as "the rather safe pipe-smoking playwright that's been handed down to us. He was, of course far more radical than that politically and was a really experimental dramatist". Soon his version enjoyed two West End runes in between travelling all over the world.

When Priestley wrote An Inspector Calls, back in 1945, he also couldn't find a theatre in London to stage it. "The official line was that there were none available," explains Daldry, "but it was also a very controversial piece of writing. So it received its first production in Moscow and Priestley travelled out to see it." It was only later, when it was put on in London by the British director Basil Dean, that it was staged in a more conventional way, with a naturalistic Edwardian drawing room and that's the 'normalised' version of the play which we've inherited.

Daldry and MacNeil discovered stage directions were not by Priestley and the play was a campaigning piece of theatre against slipping back into Edwardian sensibility.

By coincidence, Daldry's version was staged during Margaret Thatcher's premiership when she argued: "there is no such thing as society, only individual men, and women and families".

He says: "A shocking statement and just the kind of values that this play is attacking. When Mr Birling, the well-to-do head of the family in the play, talks in a very similar way, it almost could have been Thatcher speaking. Some people even thought I'd re-written the lines because it was so shockingly similar, whereas I'd actually only edited them very slightly."

Everything Daldry did, however bold it may seem, comes from the playwright, as the director is keen to point out. "In a way it seems strange to me that it is normally staged and studied in such a conventional way, that it is often seen as a rather dreary and didactic piece of writing, when really the play is pretty out there, pretty radical and bold. That was what I responded to and wanted to get across to the audience."

Despite his busy schedule 12 years on - as he commutes back and forth across the Atlantic - Daldry still finds time to stay in touch with his production. "I have a huge fondness for it," he says, "but there is something rather odd about watching it now, because I do see it as the work of a 29-year-old. I have a terrible tendency to want to fiddle with all my work - films and theatre - and this production's no different in that sense. I have to tell myself to leave it alone; it works as it is."

His first film Billy Elliot won him an Oscar nomination. And the roller-coaster continues. His all-star film The Hours, about the life of Virginia Woolf, won more acclaim, and he is currently putting the final polish on Billy Elliot - The Musical, with Elton John's music and Newcastle-born Lee Hall's book and lyrics for Working Title and Old Vic Productions. It seems he can do no wrong.

The first taste of this kind of success came with An Inspector Calls and Daldry, who was made a CBE last year, acknowledges that "it changed my career totally".

* An Inspector Calls, Newcastle Tyne Theatre, Box Office: 0870 145 1200

* Billy Elliot The Musical opens on March 24 at London's Victoria Palace Theatre. Box Office: 0870 895 5577.

Published: 03/03/2005