THE last time the New Vic Theatre took the road from Newcastle-under-Lyme to Scarborough, they delivered The Mikado in cricket gear.

Gilbert and Sullivan in flannels was the stuff of fantasy, and the New Vic now returns to the Stephen Joseph Theatre with plenty more fantasies, this time fashioned in the mind of Billy Fisher, the dreamer in Billy Liar who defined a generation of moody, morose and misunderstood teenage anti-heroes.

"Billy Liar is a completely different kettle of fish from The Mikado: it has to be produced in the way it was written," says director Chris Monks, who has moved on from G&S to W&H, the Yorkshire duo of Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall.

Billy Liar, the novel, stage play and classic of 1960s New Wave cinema, is the story of office clerk Billy Fisher, who may live in northern English industrial town of Stradhoughton but occupies his own little dream world. Each time he opens his mouth, out pops another whopper of a lie, because fantasy has to be better than reality.

"I didn't discover Billy Liar until I was 26 and it was only then that I realised I was Billy Fisher," says Monks. "I came from a South Yorkshire family, a working-class family, a steel-working family, so with my artistic aspirations I have a natural empathy with the play.

"I was born in 1955, the book was written in 1959, and we were still stuck in that post-war world. It wasn't until The Beatles in 1963 that things began to change and loosen up."

Monks makes comparisons between Billy Liar and the plays of Chekhov. "Like Chekhov, it has strong views on the human condition and the points it makes about the parent-son relationship and young aspirations are still important," he says.

"If anything, you can appreciate the play more with age. It was iconoclastic in its time and, after 40 years, you can see how the world has travelled on but is it any better?"

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