TOP OF THE CLASS...
BIG-SCREEN MUSICAL VERSION OF CHILDHOOD LITERARY CLASSIC MATILDA HITS THE HIGH NOTES
★★★★I
winning stage musical Matilda finally gets the big screen treatment featuring a host of stars including Dame Emma Thompson, Stephen Graham and Bond girl Lashana Lynch.
Director Matthew Warchus reunites with composer and lyricist Tim Minchin and scriptwriter Dennis Kelly for a swashboggling, phizz-whizzing screen adaptation of their successful West End show, that retains the acidic tang of Roald Dahl’s beloved 1988 children’s novel and expresses the loss and reclamation of childhood innocence in barn-storming song and dance numbers.
Bookish wunderkind Matilda (Alisha Weir) has the misfortune to be raised by garish used car salesman Mr Wormwood (Graham) and his monstrous wife (Andrea Riseborough).
The precocious youngster escapes into fantastical worlds on the shelves of a mobile library run by Mrs Phelps (Sindhu Vee).
Matilda harnesses dormant telekinetic powers when she enrols at Crunchem
Hall under hulking headmistress Agatha Trunchbull (Thompson), a former world champion athlete who performs an exemplary hammer throw over the school gates using one unfortunate girl’s pigtails.
Thankfully, caring teacher Miss Honey
(Lynch) recognises Matilda’s genius and encourages her gifted ward to reach her potential.
Warchus savours the opportunity to expand his playbox from stage to big screen.
Minchin’s whistle-stop tour of the alphabet in School Song (“You will soon C/there’s no escaping trage-d”) gallivants energetically through classrooms and hallways.
The brilliant anthem Revolting Children expands its deafening chorus to the entire student population of Crunchem Hall led by Charlie Hodsonprior’s chocolate cake-guzzling Bruce Bogtrotter.
The empowering When I Grow Up, MEMAWARD orably sung on stage by daydreaming pupils on soaring playground swings, loses some of its lump-in-the-throat emotional wallop when digital trickery allows pint-sized cast to ride a motorcycle or take to the skies in an acrobatic fast-jet.
Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical confidently combines sweet, salty and sour flavours, juxtaposing the cuteness and steely determination of Weir’s spirited heroine with the comic grotesquerie of Thompson’s tyrant. Warchus overloads our senses in exuberant musical set-pieces, maintaining a rip-roaring pace until the film’s new song Still Holding My Hand allows a curtain to gently fall over quietly contented characters.
Aristotle spoke the truth: the roots of education are bitter but the fruit is sweet.
Warchus’ picture is a peach.