The Daily Telegraph - Features
Thompson’s masterful Trunchbull will make you belly laugh – and shiver
Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical
PG cert, 117 min
★★★★★
Dir Matthew Warchus
Starring Alisha Weir, Emma Thompson, Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough, Lashana Lynch
In keeping with its well-read young heroine, Roald Dahl’s novel Matilda felt like a library squeezed into one bulging volume. His last major work, published two years before his death in 1988, is a rousing tale of a brilliant little girl thwarting some legendarily awful grown-ups. One minute it’s a horror story, like Stephen King’s Carrie for pre-teens; the next it’s an English classroom satire in the tradition of Ronald Searle. Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin converted it into a stage musical 12 years ago, and made Matilda a gifted storyteller – and thus their show became a parable about selfexpression, too.
Matthew Warchus’s screen adaptation of his musical has somehow streamlined it to just under two hours without blunting its poison-tips. A handful of songs have been cut, as well as a few minor characters. Matilda Wormwood (played with boundless energy by 13-year-old Alisha Weir) is now an only child, for instance – her bland elder brother, Mikey, is gone – though her dimwitted parents (Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough) still loathe her as fervently as ever. The setting is a gaudily ramped-up 1980s: in the Wormwood family home, shag pile adorns the floating staircase, while the shelves are lined with porcelain figurines.
At the other end of a wooded lane, meanwhile, lurks Crunchem Hall, a petrifying composite of Grange Hill during the Mr Bronson years and Shawshank State Penitentiary; it’s the seat of Agatha Trunchbull, its monstrous headmistress. Emma Thompson’s performance as this all-time-great villain is a masterclass in caricature. The laser-like glare, the unstoppable bosom-first stride, the one eye that twitches uncontrollably at moments of tension – every gesture and line-delivery feels honed to elicit as many shivers as belly-laughs. “I just taught them kindness, patience and respect,” the nice Miss Honey (Lashana Lynch) meekly protests during a Trunchbull meltdown. “How dare you bring those words into my classroom,” Thompson spits.
Minchin’s perky musical numbers are all performed with due wit and welly. The opener, Miracle, begins modestly, with novice parents cooing over their cot-bound newborns, but blossoms into an extravagant Busby Berkeley-style number, with bird’s-eye shots of hospital staff twirling in sequin-stitched scrubs. Matilda’s own signature song, Naughty, is still irresistibly mischievous, but When I Grow Up is the stealth heartbreaker, as her classmates daydream themselves into future careers – bus driver, motorcyclist, Red Arrows pilot
– in a sequence that shows what’s so moving about the show’s celebration of childhood promise.
In bringing the story out of the theatre, Warchus and his art department have also scaled up the narrative in inspired ways.
Trunchbull’s gymnastics class, for instance, now takes place not indoors but on a rain-lashed assault course, complete with landmines. And in a fantastical climax that has Matilda telekinetically manipulating much more than a lone stick of chalk against the headmistress, the additional CG dazzle feels justified.
Besides, the performances are big enough to balance it. While Thompson gets the lion’s share of showstopping moments, every casting decision is shrewd. Lynch’s Miss Honey (who stands up for Matilda, and vice-versa) is warmth and goodness personified, and Graham and Riseborough’s Mr and Mrs Wormwood are both uproarious nightmares. Just take a shot of the latter reclining in an armchair in a leopard-print blouse while scoffing Terry’s All Gold from the box. Like Dahl’s book, everything in this film, from tenderness to terror, is so exuberant.
In cinemas now and on Netflix from December 25
Tim Minchin’s perky songs are all performed with due wit and welly