![]() ![]() ![]() Ultimately, what makes the song so great is that it turns to the adults in the theatre and asks ‘What happened?’ What happened to that imaginative, joyful, happy child who wanted to play, watch cartoons, eat endless sweets? What happened to the child who thought that he or she would get to climb even taller trees as an adult, carry around those things that weigh you down as a kid, or be brave enough to fight the monsters hiding under your bed? As an adult listening to the lyrics, you get a curious sense of regret – that you left all that behind and ended up spending hours in front of a computer to earn money, rather than playing, climbing trees, eating sweets you get a sense of lost naivety – of those nightmares where a creature jumped out from under your bed, of that assumption that the problems get easier as you get older, that you can lie in the sun and not get sunburnt but most of all, you remember the freedom that only a child’s imagination can grant you, and just how far you’ve meandered from it. The first time I saw the show, I was on the verge of bursting into floods of tears, and even watching the Royal Variety Performance version can easily make me well up. And that is the song called ‘ When I Grow Up‘. I could write reams about the songs, the adaptation (it doesn’t just copy the book and add a piano backing), or the staging, but the absolute highlight of Minchin’s version of the show stems from that first paragraph of this blog – those high expectations we have stemming from the incredible power that is childhood, and our memories of those early days of joy and play. Instead, as Matilda sings ‘sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty’. Minchin gives her an entire song in which she attempts to persuade herself that what she calls ‘my house’, but is really a shed, is enough for her – that she doesn’t need any more than a table which is perfect for tea or a bed on which she can ‘dream nights away’. So of course Miss Trunchbull is an authoritative headmaster, and of course the Wormwoods are grotesque, but Miss Honey is not much better – she might be nice, but she’s also weak, feeble and unwilling to act. ![]() The musical completely understands that ‘Matilda’ is not just about the good people against the bad people – not about her and Miss Honey against the evil Miss Trunchbull – but in fact about the failure of all adults to govern the world of children, and the necessity for children to right the wrongs that adults can’t see or can’t admit to. ![]() What is so delightful, then, about Tim Minchin’s musical adaptation of ‘Matilda’ is, to put it bluntly, just how well he gets it. That wistful look back to those wonderful days of reading way past your bedtime, turning page after page, promising to stop at the end of the chapter but always somehow managing to overlook the transition – that is a high bar to try and reach, because as Dahl well knew, the imagination and wonder of a child far outweighs that of any adult. For those who grew up reading Roald Dahl’s wonderful books, a new version has an incredibly high bar to meet – not just replicating the literary quality of his novels, not just in bringing to life his wonderful characters, ideas, settings and plots in a suitable way, but also the incredible power of childhood memory. ![]()
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