Adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book is a musical for our times
Ilearned recently that there are people who don’t like musicals. If you are one of them, allow me to do some proselytising; without wanting to sound melodramatic, I fear for the state of your mortal soul.
The musical combines every one of the performing arts, offers a platform for visual arts that can accommodate both spectacle and minimalism, and exploits all the dexterity and wit of the verbal arts — language, rhetoric and text.
It is an art form that contains and promotes all other art forms. This means that creators, casts and crews need collective expertise in each discipline to pull it off.
Don’t come at me with complaints like, “I just don’t find it believable when characters break into song and dance.” If your imagination can’t stretch that far, I doubt you have the capacity to gain real pleasure from any kind of art.
And if your heart can’t shift from the heights of joy and laughter to the depths of sorrow and fear as characters pursue the arcs of their stories — well, your heart may pump blood, but it ain’t good for much else.
And if you don’t love a foottapping tune, and the thrill of someone who actually can tap their feet (and more) simultaneously executing the perfect combination of rhythm and melody on a stage or screen right there in front of you, for your entertainment and delight ... I would go so far as to say that you are missing out on what it means to be fully human.
Okay, I admit, the “best and worst aspects of humanity” stuff sounds like grandiose soapboxing. Forgive me. But go and see Matilda: The Musical before you tell me I am wrong.
This adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book, first staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 2010, is a musical for our times. It opens with the song
Miracle, a satirical take on that easy target of the 21st century: the indulged, entitled, mediocre child whose neurotic parents are obsessed with taking photos. Then things get worse. We meet the Wormwood family, with a father who celebrates the vacuousness of TV and a mother whose credo is: “A little less brains! A lot more hair!”
It is a powerful display of the Dunning-Kruger effect: the idiotic and inept admire themselves for their brilliance and are too stupid to be persuaded otherwise. The Wormwoods would vote for Brexit and Donald Trump. But they are also crooks. Give Mr Wormwood a chance and he would happily fleece VBS customers or Steinhoff shareholders.
And then there is Miss Trunchbull, sadist extraordinaire, and the institutionalised violence and torture of the school she runs.
This is not a world for children. And yet it is a world in which children must somehow survive. To do so, as the eponymous heroine sings, “Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty”: you have to protest against wicked authorities. Most countries could do with a bit of that insurrectionist verve.
By the end of Matilda we have seen the poignancy of childhood innocence — the moving chorus of When I Grow Up — and we have faced the
horror of many children’s experiences of suffering and cruelty. Which means that the climactic number Revolting
Children, when Trunchbull’s tyranny has been overcome, becomes a powerful declaration of emancipation by the downtrodden.
It is not simply a case of wish fulfilment, the fantasy of justice in an unjust world (although
Matilda, like many musicals, does provide this for us). Instead, over the course of two hours, we have had demonstrated to us the full scope of what human ingenuity, talent, collaboration and sheer hard work can achieve.
The famous act of telekinesis that causes Miss Trunchbull’s downfall is confirmation that Matilda is more than a bookworm and a genius; she is, somehow, superhuman. But in this stage version, it is her astonishing storytelling ability that impresses us most.
And, as we are happily reminded by a brilliant piece of musical theatre, that is both a common and an extraordinary human quality.