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Almost 16 years have passed since I wrote the screenplay for The Full Monty.
There have been a lot of films in between and my career has taken me to places I couldn't have dreamed of, including standing on stage and receiving an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire.
Yet much as I enjoyed the whirlwind success of that film, there is nothing in my career I am more proud of than The Full Monty.
It was my first screenplay, the first time I'd ever written anything that genuinely moved anyone. The story of six unemployed Sheffield steelworkers touched cinema-goers across the globe and grossed £162m worldwide - amazing for a film that nobody particularly wanted to fund in the first place.
Beaufoy: 'It was my first screenplay, the first time I'd ever written anything that genuinely moved anyone'
It was the last throw of the dice from Fox Searchlight, a division of Twentieth Century Fox that was in financial trouble at the time, but it went on to be the most successful film to hit Britain's cinemas until Titanic outsold it.
When we made it no one was thinking about getting rich or Oscar nominations. We were all just struggling to make a film about something we thought was important. That subject was the crippling recession of the early 80s and the devastating effect it had on the lives of men who saw their jobs snatched away, and with them their self-worth and sense of place in the world.
Nowhere was this more pertinent than in Sheffield, where the destruction of the steel industry that had been the city's backbone since Victorian times seemed almost like public humiliation. But we wanted to tell it in the tone and voice of the people who had been suffering. That voice was very funny and that's how I approached the story.
I feel so honoured to have been given another chance to bring the story to life - and to bring it back to Sheffield, its rightful home. This time it's on stage, and it feels like reclaiming something that had gone awry. In the years immediately following the film's success it became a Broadway musical, set in Buffalo in upstate New York, which transferred briefly to the West End and to me was a huge disappointment.
The new cast: I feel so honoured to have been given another chance to bring the story to life`
I was not involved in that production - I never even saw it - but I know it wasn't faithful to the original material. Changes - like the relocation - were simply made so that it would work on Broadway and earn money.
Yet to me, and many of the people who still stop me in the street to speak about the film, Sheffield, with its endearing innocence and dry humour, was crucial to The Full Monty's success. It's a story for everyone, but it belongs in the North. I grew up in Keighley, West Yorkshire, but spent a lot of time as a young man visiting a girlfriend in hospital in Sheffield. In between visiting times I can vividly remember walking around, one of many men wandering aimlessly and wondering what had happened to their city while all around them the steelworks were being destroyed.
'Communities that relied on a single industry - like steel, coal or shipbuilding - had their hearts ripped out. Today the sense of disem powerment, uselessness and depression that comes with unemployment is of course the same'
So the stage play is set once more in Sheffield, and features the same characters and story, without being simply a carbon copy of the film. I felt quite strongly that audiences would want to come and see a really good stage production in its own right, not just a pastiche of the film, so that's how I approached it. There was only one scene from the film that we all said had to be included, and that's the scene in the Job Centre queue where everyone starts rehearsing their dance.
I thought the audience might riot if it wasn't in the new production, yet it was the most challenging to recreate because when I really examined it, I realised it was the skilful film editing that made it so memorable.
And, of course, you can't 'edit' on stage.
The original: Robert Carlyle in the film from 1997
It was a very steep learning curve for me, and enormously invigorating after nearly 16 years of writing for cinema, to learn a whole new craft. My first attempt at a script was terrible. I had to discover what works on stage and what doesn't. In a film you can take the audience anywhere you want. In a split second you can cut from inside to outside or wherever, but on stage you have to bring the action to a single place.
Ironically, I think it feels perfect for the stage. It's an ensemble piece about a group of men who are literally and metaphorically stuck in one place wondering what the hell to do next. It doesn't require a host of locations, a cast of thousands or the specifics of cinema. We decided to set the play in the dilapidated remains of a steelworks.
I did toy with moving it to contemporary times, as we're once again in the grip of a recession, but I think it resonates more to leave it in the late 80s. To day's recession is very different. back then it was a slump of seismic proportions: an entire swathe of heavy industry wiped out in a matter of years.
Communities that relied on a single industry - like steel, coal or shipbuilding - had their hearts ripped out. Today the sense of disempowerment, uselessness and depression that comes with unemployment is of course the same, but this recession seems less visible, more insidious, something felt just by those people working in little factories on industrial estates on the outskirts of towns.
Sexual politics and the sense of body embarrassment have also evolved since I wrote the original screenplay. In the late 80s there were all sorts of role reversals going on that people found quite shocking. Men were just starting to become aware of their own body image, and in working-class communities it was a new thing to have female breadwinners with disposable incomes going out to clubs on a Friday night to watch strippers.
These days, however, you'd think we'd all be a little blasé about seeing a few young (and not-so young) chaps in the buff. But apparently not. To answer the question that seems to be troubling everyone right now - yes, in the play they really do go the Full Monty!
The Full Monty is at the Sheffield Lyceum until 23 February, then tours the UK. For tickets, visit www.fullmontytheplay.com
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