Matilda isn’t as cute as she looks!
Feckless parents, terrifying cruelty and a hairy-legged headmistress. As its child stars wow the West End, QUENTIN LETTS hails the most politically incorrect show in town
WHAT pretty buttons those four child actresses from Matilda The Musical looked in yesterday’s newspapers. The West End adaptation of Roald Dahl’s book was a big winner at the Olivier Awards, scooping seven prizes, but the reason for its success goes beyond the cuteness of little stars Cleo Demetriou, Kerry Ingram, Sophia Kiely and Eleanor Worthington Cox.
No. The secret to Matilda is that it has a nose-tweaking mixture of satire and stoicism and is bracingly, rousingly, refreshingly forthright about everything from school bullies to feckless parents to hairy-legged headmistresses.
Matilda is unashamedly politically incorrect. It contains a cry against egalitarian dumbing-down and, along the way, gives us some clever and memorable songs.
That, I suspect, is why it is proving such a hit. The performances of Cleo, Kerry, Sophia, Eleanor and their fellow cast members are merely an extra joy.
The late Dahl knew that children love a strong measure of gore in their fiction. Not for him the preference of Hollywood scriptwriters to depict everything in children’s lives as sunlit and sugary.
You surely remember what happened to all those little horrors in Dahl’s
Children love gore, not sugary sentimentality
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory — a progression of comeuppances for spoilt brats such as Veruca Salt and Augustus Gloop. Aiee! Down the chute they went to their sticky ends. Death, destruction, justice!
Matilda takes the same unsentimental approach to life. It does not smear our lenses with Vaseline, romanticising poverty and pretending that love is everywhere. The heroine, Matilda Wormwood, has an unhappy home life. Her father is a dodgy car dealer and her mother is a vain trollop who is having an affair with her tango teacher.
The Wormwoods are sink-estate horrors and they treat bookish Matilda as a skivvy. They cannot understand why their daughter is interested in visiting libraries and they urge her to spend more time watching the telly and behaving like her moronic older brother, a drongo who wears a baseball cap back-to-front and sits in the living room, scratching his groin.
The depiction of these dingbats is so withering, so merciless, it is a wonder it has not been attacked by the Left-wing media for being ‘elitist’. Indeed, it may be a surprise it has not been invaded by that Trenton Oldfield chap who stopped the Varsity Boat Race two weekends ago.
We can also note that the library visited by Matilda makes no concessions to the 21st century. It has not plunged downmarket in an appeal to modern yoof, filling the place with computer screens and pop music. It is full of books and is a sanctuary for self-improvement.
This, readers, is revolutionary stuff. If you suggest on BBC Radio 4 that it is what today’s libraries should be like — as I did when making a documentary a couple of years ago — you are likely to find yourself attacked for being ‘snobbish’. Yet here it is in a show which has just won seven Olivier awards. Hooray.
Matilda is sent to a primary school, Crunchem Hall. As its name suggests, it is a place where little darlings are placed in the bone-pulper and are swiftly shown who is boss.
You soon gather that the ‘ best practice’ bores of today’s Leftist educational establishment would not approve of Crunchem Hall. The likes of the National Union of Teachers and its leader Christine Blower have surely missed a trick by not condemning Crunchem Hall as an inaccurate and one- sided view of today’s state schools — a wicked Tory plot.
The place is the domain of a terrifying headmistress, Miss Agatha Trunchbull. Cue threatening chords and darkening skies. Uh oh. Sometime hammer- throwing athlete Miss Trunchbull grabs one little dainty by her pigtails and rotates her in the air just like one of the hammers she used to hurl into the far distance in her track-andfield heyday.
Another child, Bruce Bogtrotter, is forced to eat the most revolting amount of chocolate cake. It is like watching one of those French geese being force-fed to make foie gras.
Has no one told the NSPCC? Is this not a terrible portrayal of child cruelty, a glorification of ‘inappropriate’ teaching methods? I am shocked that there has not yet been a Twitter petition on the matter.
‘The Trunch’ is a cross between Rosa Klebb and Jaws from the James Bond films and is played with utter brilliance by the male actor Bertie Carvel.
Boy, what a bosom: it sticks out like the Arctic Ocean’s Siberian Shelf. She makes Ann Widdecombe look like Twiggy. Chill are the winds which blow off that vast bust, too. At the merest whiff of pupil dissent, Miss Trunchbull stomps into action, her whiskered, gigantic wart a-twitch like a bloodhound’s snout.
She shrieks at the children, calling them ‘maggots’ and ‘worms’. Is it too naughty of me to suggest, gently, that there are probably thousands of teachers out there in modern Britain who would dearly love to do the same rather than having to maintain an air of angermanagement equanimity when they try to restore order in their classrooms?
In the splendid song The Smell Of Rebellion, Miss Trunchbull prowls the stage, growling, hissing, scenting the breeze for the ‘ stench’ of juvenile protest. ‘The funk of defiance, the odour of coup, the waft of anarchy in progress,’ she sings.
‘For midgets who are fidgeting and whispering in history, their chattering and chittering, their nattering and twittering, is tempered with a smattering of DISCIPLINE!’
Great writing and a great performance from Mr Carvel, spit
Miss Trunchbull
makes Widdy look like Twiggy
hurtling from his curled lips as he reaches the word ‘discipline’. Really, Mr Carvel should have picked up a best actress award too. And he should have done it in costume, wearing his over-shoulder-boulder-holder of a bra.
But hang on a moment. This is modern Britain, isn’t it? This is the era of Harriet Harman’s Equalities Act and a legion of other foolishnesses, a land where we are forced, on pain of legal sanctions and a hubbub about sexist misanthropy, not to take the mickey out of authority figures on account of their looks.
Yet this bow-legged Miss Trunchbull is a glorious caricature of the spinsterly pedagogue. She is butcher than Fatima Whitbread, wartier than a hippo.
Should the feminist Fawcett Society not leap to her defence? Should Germaine Greer not embrace her as a legitimate and welcome symbol of the empowerment of women, if only in memory of fallen sister Andrea Dworkin?
As you may gather, I loved Matilda, having seen it first when it was the Christmas show in 2010 at the state- subsidised Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-upon-avon, and then enjoying it just as much when it transferred to London.
Here is a musical for our age. It is fresh but, thanks to the genius of Dahl, somehow familiar, because so many of us read it to our own children and grandchildren. Despite its knockabout, the show has plenty of heart. It also has the tang of salt that comes with the best satire.
Dahl may have written his story a quarter of a century ago, but he was eerily prescient about the grottiness which has recently infected so much of our culture.
He knew, equally, that children react best when they have to work out solutions for themselves.
Matilda does this. She is not cosseted. She is not patronised or suffocated by well-meaning, interfering grown-ups. She gets on with things and, as those Oliviers proved, she triumphs.