Theatre / Review
Review: Matilda the Musical, Hippodrome
There can be few touring shows more eagerly anticipated than Matilda, the 2010 musical adaptation of Roald Dahl’s typically funny, anarchic, warm and sentimental tale of a clever little girl defeating a bunch of bullying, stupid adults against the odds.
Trailing awards in its wake like the ferocious Miss Trunchbull drags her pupils around by their pigtails, it arrives on the Bristol stage with a bold, brash, unerringly confident bang and has every audience member on their feet with applause by the end of the evening.
The show’s major trump card is a brilliant set of songs by Australian musical comic Tim Minchin, which subtly probe Matilda’s themes of childhood helplessness, morality and rebellion in a way that makes them as poignant for adults as for children, and which will be stuck in your head for days.
is needed now More than ever
Pics: Manueal Harlan
But equal props should be given to Dennis Kelly’s book, which slightly updates and extends the characterisation of both Matilda and her teacher Miss Honey, taking them beyond the idealised caricatures of Dahl’s imagination and making them more likeable and believable.
The production is as faultlessly showstopping as you’d expect from a show of this pedigree. The brilliant young cast stomp, stroll and shimmy their way across the beautifully angular and colourful set as if they’d all been born to it. Matilda herself (tonight played by Olivia Cleverly) is a delight, not least because Kelly gets her righteous precociousness out of the way early on and focuses instead on her defiant bravery – for all that Dahl’s character was quietly feisty, it’s hard to imagine her strolling into a library and calmly asking “Where’s your Revenge section?” as she does here.
Carly Thoms’ Miss Honey also gets a subtle makeover, with some monologues that foreground her own struggle with self-doubt as she attempts to help a brilliant girl who is suffering what, in 2019, we cannot fail to recognise as abuse. When she comes in for a line of the show’s signature tune When I Grow Up, questioning her ability to “fight the creatures that you have to fight… to be a grown-up,” there can hardly be a dry adult eye in the house.
Miss Trunchbull, meanwhile, remains the delightfully despicable caricature that’s haunted many a child’s nightmares since the 80s. Male actor Elliot Harper plays her with glowering intensity, punctured by some brilliant turns of physical comedy that pitch her strength and size against the children’s tiny but determined collective willpower. Harper doesn’t even break character for the curtain call, lapping up the audience’s boos from his tiny scooter and even getting a final shout of “Maggot!” as the curtain goes down.
As with most of Dahl’s books, it’s a heady concoction of melodrama, pathos, humour and morality whose elements don’t always cohere fully. But if the show sometimes wants to have its cake and eat it, we in the audience are Bruce Bogtrotter, the child who greedily and unapologetically gobbles up the whole cake.
Matilda the Musical continues at Bristol Hippodrome until Saturday, June 8. For more info and to book tickets, visit www.atgtickets.com/venues/bristol-hippodrome
Read more: Interview: Dom Coyote
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