RACHAEL CLEGG talks to the director of a new show about the late, great Billie Holiday which gets its world premiere in Harrogate next week.

"SOMEBODY once said that we never know what's enough until we know what's more than enough" spoke Billie Holiday.

The "voice of living intensity of soul", as Leonard Feather once put it, was speaking from experience. It was the hard experience of Holiday's life which added to the "soul" in her voice.

Holiday's life was one of extremes. Sell-out shows at the height of her fame in the 1930s and 1940s, bracketed by poverty, prostitution, sexual abuse, imprisonment and drugs.

Raped at the age of ten by her mother's boyfriend, by 14 she was working as a prostitute - alongside her mother. The pair were arrested in the same brothel in 1929, and Billie was put into state care. In the early-1930s she moved to New York, where she was discovered by John Hammond, who organised her first recording session with Benny Goodman in 1933.

There followed a string of hits over the next ten years - but the cycle of abuse that started in her early life continued. In 1941 she married drug dealer Jimmy Monroe, who introduced her to opium and heroin. They divorced six years later, and in 1952 she married Mafia "enforcer" Louis McKay. He was abusive, and the pair separated.

Her life ended tragically early at the age of 44 in 1959. In May that year she was taken to the Metropolitan Hospital in New York, suffering from liver and heart problems. She was later placed under house arrest at the hospital for possession of drugs, and remained under police guard until she died two months later.

Bringing Holiday's tumultuous story to the stage has been a challenging project for producer and director Stephen Leatherland whose musical, The Billie Holiday Story, receives its world premiere at the Harrogate Theatre on Wednesday.

"This is a show with a social conscience" says Leatherland. "The production doesn't seek to pull any punches. It is entertainment, yes, but entertainment that doesn't duck the difficult realities of the singer's life". These difficulties include race relations in a pre-civil rights America and an ever-prevalent desire to be loved, "for which she endured a great deal of abuse".

Pivotal to the success of The Billie Holiday Story is a strong, versatile actress with a great voice. "Finding the right actress to play such a complex character as Billie Holiday was probably the hardest part," Leatherland admits. Actress Yaa has been having "a crash course on Holiday". In rehearsals "Yaa was crying because she found one of the scenes so emotive".

"What we're trying to convey is that she had great highs and lows in her life," he says. "Her early life was very poverty stricken, but then she went on to perform at sell-out shows. She was a great black icon - not because she was a great civil rights activist, rather she was her own person and wouldn't be told what to do."