Why scary stories are what our children need
As ‘Matilda’ goes on tour, Ben Lawrence wonders if Roald Dahl’s books would make it past today’s politically correct brigade
The success of Matilda has certainly reinforced the need for nightmares
Matilda the Musical, based on the children’s novel by Roald Dahl, is one of the most successful family shows of modern times. It has won countless awards, both in England and America, and has toured all over the world and broken box office records on Broadway.
Now, to underline its popularity with children, the Royal Shakespeare Company is embarking on a fresh tour of the play and sending its staff into schools around the UK to work with pupils to put on their own versions of Matilda, as part of a new education programme.
This sounds like unadulterated good news. The arts often get squeezed in schools, and this initiative is guaranteed to develop children’s imaginations. But it is not too farfetched to wonder whether, if Dahl tried to publish his novel today, it would pass muster with the politically correct brigade who hold sway in publishing and education.
For while, on the surface, Matilda is a story about a girl with telekinetic powers who loves books, it is also about child cruelty, dysfunctional family relationships, psychopathic behaviour, poverty and death. Oh, and the Mafia features quite heavily, too.
In short, the novel and the play, which features music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and a book by Dennis Kelly, is scary, and scaring children, or revealing anything ugly about the world, is not in vogue today. Instead, we have young adult literature kowtowing to political correctness, curriculums addressing genderbased violence in fairy tales, and playful antics in children’s films being questioned by action groups.
Francesca Simon, the author of the Horrid Henry books, revealed recently that health and safety concerns have meant she has not been allowed to show her characters playing with saucepans or striking matches. “Are we meant in picture books to reflect the world as it is or the world as we’d like it to be?” she asked, rhetorically, on the Today programme on Radio 4.
Kelly, who has written some very disturbing works for adults, believes that Matilda’s success is largely down to the way Dahl writes so truthfully for children. “Dahl tells the truth and makes it colourful and funny,” he says. “He doesn’t sugar-coat it. He says that this thing called life is a bit grim.”
That’s not to say Kelly wasn’t sensitive when writing the stage version of Matilda; he knew that certain scenes had to be handled responsibly – notably the one featuring the acrobat, a character in a story told by Matilda who dies shortly after giving birth.
“Matthew [Warchus, the director] once said to me that adults love to cry at the theatre, but if you’ve got kids crying there’s a problem. Adults cry because they have found something beautiful, whereas kids cry because they are really bloody upset.”
Jacqui O’hanlon, the director of education at the RSC, agrees. “We would never say that everything is OK for every child. [Our] new Macbeth
[soon to open in Stratford-upon-avon] will be full of psychological horror, so it would be irresponsible for us to say that it is suitable for every eight- or nine-year-old.”
The issue of political correctness is one about which Kelly has mixed feelings. “We shouldn’t say hurtful things to each other, but at the same time it can go too far. Free speech is really important and we have to let people say awful things. It’s dangerous to stop ideas and if we try to, kids are going to discover them anyway.”
Should we be fearful of a climate in which children’s films and books have to take into account so many different sensitivities? I mention to Kelly the recent controversy over the film version of Peter Rabbit, in which a man with a blackberry allergy is seen being pelted with the fruit. Members of the Kids with Food Allergies Foundation called on the film to be banned.
Kelly hasn’t seen the film, but says he can imagine getting in similar hot water. “I could see myself maybe writing something like that without realising it could be offensive,” he says.
The question of what is suitable and what is unsuitable for children is clearly complex, but the success of Matilda has certainly reinforced a need for nightmares, and lent credence to the idea that a bit of horror is healthy for children as long as the parameters are firmly indicated. This is manifest in much of Dahl’s writing for children. Think of the grisly fates of the monstrous children in Charlie
and the Chocolate Factory, or the slapstick but visceral violence that Mr and Mrs Twit inflict upon each other.
The best children’s literature has
always refused to shield youngsters from ugly reality or, indeed, terror. One passage in E Nesbit’s classic Five
Children and It shows the youngsters nearly being scalped by American Indians, while the popular Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events
series makes terror a norm, albeit with a Gaudi-like sense of style.
Meanwhile there are also more nuanced examples of authors refusing to mask the truth from their young readers. Tom’s Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce, one of the greatest children’s books ever written, has its young hero learn the tragedy of time’s passing as he realises that Hattie, the Victorian ghost he has befriended when he travels back in time, will in fact die years before he is born.
But Matilda satisfies another need in young minds, too. “With very young children, we have discovered that the more complex the language, the better they respond,” says O’hanlon. “They are captivated by language and they don’t see it as difficult. When you are that age, you are acquiring new and difficult words all the time.”
The language in Matilda – clever, playful and slightly subversive – will form the basis of the RSC’S Change My Story education programme. Theatre practitioners will work with children in 50 schools to develop and put on their own shortened versions of the play. And O’hanlon says the creative side will be left in the hands of the children, who will be every age from infant school to sixth form.
Perhaps, in the end, we shouldn’t worry too much about malign forces inhibiting storytelling. The success of
Matilda, a tale about a little girl’s love of reading and her ability to spin a yarn, proves that the imagination will always win out. As a writer, Kelly can identify with this.
“I got s--- marks at school because I couldn’t apply myself, but my teacher gave me good marks for stories. I had an impulse, which I was able to channel. It’s that same impulse that can get us to Mars, that can invent life-saving cancer drugs. It’s all creativity and that’s a fundamental part of who we are as humans. We want to be creative and when we’re not, it stultifies us a little.”