Like Billy, Mrs. Wilkinson emphasizes the incongruity of the dancers in this setting as she walks between them smoking and calling directions in her broad accent and gruff voice. This is reinforced when she asks Billy to pay for the lesson. This inability of each of the characters to express positive emotions is one of the ways in which dialogue is used to establish the harshness of the world Billy must escape. Billys sense of achievement at completing a pirouette is immediately undermined by Mrs. Wilkinsons criticism about his hands; Debbys discussion about her parents relationship reveals no sense of romance and her offer to show Billy her fanny emphasizes the lack of innocence and hope in this world, Billys attempt at thanking Mrs. Wilkinson by saying Ill miss you is met with, no, you wont and Tonys belated attempt to tell Billy he will miss him when Billy is already on the bus, Billy cannot hear him, they are separated by the glass of the window. Only in the refuge of the private lessons is Billy able to express his feelings of loss for his mother, when he and Mrs. Wilkinson share the reading of his mothers letter to him and only Michael when he says to Billy I think youd look smashing about how Billy would look in a tutu seems openly able to show his feelings to bill. This lack of self-expression suggests a fear of showing weakness and the sense of failure of dreams and aspirations common in the community.
For Billy however, as he says in his interview, dance becomes a means of escape from his surroundings, a refuge, a form of self-expression and, ultimately, a way out of this closed community and into the world at large. When Billy begins his private lessons with Mrs. Wilkinson, the gym is bathed in an ethereal light glowing through the window suggestion a realm of dreams, in stark contract to the dreary weather, austere colours and dull lighting of the setting of the town. After his father has discovered his dancing and banned it, his dancing becomes his means of self expression, as suggested in his aggressive, dance, a la Tap Dogs, where his moves seem to be punishing the industrial cityscape, his sense of frustration expressed when he breaks out of the confined space f the toilet; his kick smash down the door symbolically representing the capacity for dance to set him free. At this point, though, his quest for freedom ends in a dead end of rusted corrugated iron.
The symbolic capacity of doors and doorways to represent both a barrier separating and a means of escape are explored in many scenes. When Mrs. Wilkinson first suggests to Billy he try out for the royal ballet school, Billy listens outside the door, through the window and opens the door to get back into the car. In his futile attempt to escape from the anonymous violent authority figures of the police, Tony runs through doorway after doorway, but for him there is no escape. As his fathers sledgehammer smashes the piano to provide wood for the fore at Christmas, Billy cowers behind the toilet door, which swings against him at each discordant twang. When Billy tells Jackie he wants to back out of the audition, the next scene shows him opening the door into the audition room. When Billy reads his acceptance, he is separated from his family by the sliding foot of his room.