Interview: Lee Hall, playwright

LEE HALL was browsing in a second-hand bookshop when a title caught his eye: Pitmen Painters: The Ashington Group 1934-1984. "It seemed like a joke, an oxymoron," he says, "so I got it down off the shelf."

The book, by art critic William Feaver, was about a group of coalminers from the Northumberland town of Ashington who signed up for an art class and ended up mixing with some of the top avant-garde painters of their generation. Hall read the first chapter on the way home, and immediately realised he had found his next project.

Hall was looking for something new, after overseeing the adaptation of his film Billy Elliot for the stage. The Pitmen Painters echoed the story of the boy dancer growing up during the miners' strike, which in turn echoed Hall's own story: a working-class lad from Newcastle who has gone on to become one of the country's top stage- and screenwriters.

Now living in Islington with his wife, the film director Beeban Kidron, he has kept his Geordie accent, and remains passionately committed to making work which is accessible to all, as well as working on high profile projects, such as the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's new film, War Horse.

"In a way, Billy Elliot was autobiographical. I can't dance, but I think his dancing was me discovering about writing and literature. I thought I'd done with coalminers, but I realised that The Pitmen Painters was a prequel to Billy Elliot. It was what might have happened to Billy Elliot's grandad."

Hall, now 44, went to Cambridge on a scholarship and had his first hit with the radio play Spoonface Steinberg in 1997. Billy Elliot, directed by Stephen Daldry and released in 2000, went on to gross $110 million (about 73m) worldwide. When approached by Elton John, who wanted to turn it into a musical, Hall was at first hesitant, but now admits he prefers it to the film. It is still running on Broadway, where it won ten Tony Awards.

The Pitmen Painters opened in the 200-seater Live Theatre in Newcastle in 2007. "I really thought it would run for four weeks and that would be the end of it," he says. But after three sell-out runs the National Theatre in London, a UK tour and a run on Broadway, he has had to admit otherwise. Now touring again prior to a season on the West End, it is in Scotland for the first time this week. He says it may be the play he is most proud of.

The Ashington miners signed up for an art appreciation class in the 1930s, but their tutor swiftly realised that they needed to learn by doing. Their paintings became highly acclaimed and they engaged in lively debate with the artists of their day, including Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore.

"They were taken on as equals by these people. It stands a lot of prejudices that even I have on their heads. If I'd made this up, I don't think people would have believed it, and that's what's marvellous about it. It's a coming together of these extremes of society, and showing not only that a conversation was possible, but that a rather special and brilliant thing came out of it.

"What really appealed to me was that it was not just an artistic endeavour, it was an intellectual endeavour. The pictures came out of an engagement with the world which was political, cultural, aesthetic. This was a group of people who left school when they were 11, worked every day in a mine, but would come up from the pit and read Ruskin and art history and poetry and Shakespeare."

The pitmen painters were part of a wider aspirational movement, supported by the unions and the Workers Educational Association. Many mines had pithead libraries: "And the kinds of things they borrowed were Shakespeare and Milton. There was such a hunger for learning, the sense that they had a right to access all this."

He is aware how extraordinary all this seems today. "The play asks the question, 'What has gone wrong?' It's a lament for what we've lost, what people fought for in the 1930s, and was achieved in the post-war period, which seems to have vanished in my lifetime."

He is concerned that the recent cuts to higher education funding will damage social mobility still further. "The Coalition has cut the arts grants to universities. It means that only the sons and daughters of the wealthy are going to be able to pursue this. I think this is going to skew what our culture is, it's going to put us back 100 years. If I was 14 now in Newcastle, there's no way I'd end up doing what I'm doing."

He realises now that he grew up in a "halcyon age" when young teachers, enthused by the radical politics of the 1960s, encouraged him to read Brecht as a teenager. Many of the actors in The Pitmen Painters are his contemporaries from youth drama projects in Newcastle. Just as most of the boys cast as Billy Elliot in the musical come from working-class backgrounds, the performers themselves mirror the story being told.

Hall worked with novelist Michael Morpurgo on the screenplay for War Horse, the story about a horse sold into the calvary in the First World War and its young master, which was adapted for the stage to huge acclaim. The film, made by Spielberg's Dreamworks, and starring Emily Watson, Benedict Cumberbatch and Peter Mullan, is due to be released later this year.

"Weirdly the week that we finished it, Spielberg expressed an interest, we sent him the script, and within a couple of weeks he'd decided he was going to make the film – it was one of those situations that never happens in the world of film," Hall says. He hasn't seen the film, and adds that Notting Hill writer Richard Curtis was later brought on board to work on rewrites.

While Hall continues to work in film – he is mid-way through writing a screenplay about the composer Messiaen – he feels that theatre is where he heart lies. He is in discussion with the National Theatre of Scotland about adapting Alan Warner's novel The Sopranos for the stage next year.

"In many ways, theatre is more rewarding for a writer. I used to think it was like painting a wall, that when the play is finished, it's done, but now I realise it's more like gardening, you plant the thing, then you have to constantly tend it. You're part of a thing that's living. Marvellous and glamorous as it might be to make a film with Spielberg, I feel more lucky to work with a group like the Pitmen cast. That means most to me."

• The Pitmen Painters is at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow, until 30 July.