Writer enjoys transforming Matilda into successful musical

THE hit musical Matilda has been seen by more than two million people across the globe.

With productions in London’s West End and New York’s Broadway and tours of the United States and Australia already under its belt, Roald Dahl’s story of a little girl who is ‘‘ a little bit naughty’’ has been a runway success.

And now, with the announcement of a UK tour, the musical, which has won seven Olivier Awards, will be watched by even more families. But when it was created for the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2010 Christmas production, the team behind Matilda didn’t dare to dream it would be so successful.

Matilda was co-written by comedian Tim Minchin (creating the music and lyrics) and playwright Dennis Kelly (creating the book). For Dennis, writing a musical was a new experience.

Although he’d written a number of successful plays including Orphans and Taking Care of Baby, both of which were performed at Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Matilda was his first musical. And he admits that initially it was a little bewildering.

“I did about two or three drafts of it and then Tim came along and wrote a bunch of songs and we tried to jam them into the script and realised that didn’t work so we re-wrote it and he rewrote some songs and I re-wrote some script,” he says.

“We generally wrote separately and we’d come back together in workshops. Tim might suggest that ‘you need this to build up to a song’ or I might suggest something about a song because of the way it’s working so we were quite separate in what we were doing but moving together.”

And this approach worked well for the team.

“We did three or four workshops over a two or three-year period and there was no hierarchy,” Dennis continues. “It was the RSC’s idea to get the writer first to try and shape it so I was on first but then when everyone else joined there were no egos with it.

‘‘That was largely down to the original director, Matthew Warchus – everyone ended up being inspired by his lack of ego to leave their egos behind. So it never mattered where an idea came from, what mattered was the idea itself.

“What made it work was that we had the Dahl novel. I never really had to think about what Dahl’s voice was because it’s so engrained in you as a kid and I think Tim felt the same. So it never felt like we were writing a different thing – we always felt we were writing in the same direction.

“What’s great about Dahl’s Matilda is that it’s one of the stories you can understand being a musical.

“It’s so big and crazy already that it doesn’t bother me that someone stops and sings, which is one of the things that can be difficult in musicals.”

And despite musical theatre being a new direction for Dennis, he loved the final result.

“I’m really pleased with Matilda. I think its success is largely down to Tim’s songs – they are brilliant. They are consistently good all the way through, there’s not one where you think ‘let’s just get rid of that one’.

‘‘Way back in the mists of time they asked me if I’d like a go at writing lyrics and I thought I would give it a go if only to see if I was rubbish at it. “I tried and I was rubbish at it! “When Tim came along and I saw what he was writing I could see that it was way better than what I had been doing.’’

Dennis wasn’t initially daunted by the idea of putting such a well-known and greatly loved character as Matilda on stage – mainly because he hadn’t realised just how popular she was.

“At the time I didn’t know Matilda,” he says.

“I knew the Charlie books but I think I was a bit older than the generation which was brought up with Matilda. I went and read it and really loved it but I didn’t really realise how much Matilda meant to people.

‘‘Then I was in a café and I was writing and I remember the waiter asking me what I was working on and I said ‘Matilda’ and he just went mental. He was quoting bits of Matilda and telling me it was his favourite book and it had really inspired him and at that moment I thought ‘Oh no – I’d better try and get this right.’

“At that time I was thinking I was doing a Christmas show for the RSC, I wasn’t thinking about it being a West End show or that sort of thing. And you can’t really write with too much of a sense of responsibility. Dahl wasn’t writing with a sense of responsibility, he was writing with a sense of relish.

“I like the fact that it’s got someone who is fighting the power and the fact that the one doing that is a little girl. Hollywood used to have a rule that you don’t put a girl in as a hero in a kids’ thing because boys won’t watch little girls but we get boys watching Matilda all the time.”

Dennis may have originally been writing for the RSC Christmas show but it quickly became apparent to the Stratford-based theatre company, which is best known for staging Shakespeare productions, that it had a hit on its hands.

“I remember the first preview and it going on and Matilda came out and did her song Naughty and I was sitting there and thinking ‘is this going well?’ and ‘is she doing that all right?’” Dennis recalls.

“And then when she sat down at the end of the song, the audience just went mental and I thought ‘this might be all right, this might be working.’

“But we took it step by step. Once we’d done Stratford then we started thinking about the West End and then the rest.

“We didn’t know when we brought it to the West End and when we took it to America that people would take it to their hearts.”

Matilda The Musical will visit Birmingham Hippodrome from July 3 – September 8, 2018.