Audiences
should watch out for the burp when they’re watching Matilda The Musical next
week. For writer Dennis Kelly, who co-penned the smash hit adaptation of Roald
Dahl’s 1988 novel about a book-mad five-year-old girl with telekinesis, when
the involuntary form of facial flatulence rumbles into life during its
month-long Edinburgh run that begins tonight, it’s the perfect example of how a
slick main stage show can still feel wonderfully rough around the edges.
“For
a big musical, the show feels really theatrical,” says Kelly, who wrote the
show with composer and Edinburgh Festival Fringe favourite Tim Minchin. “It is
polished, but it doesn’t always feel like it, which is great. To do the burp,
we talked about loads of different ideas about how to do it and make it feel as
though a burp had just happened, but in the end we went for something really
simple, which works in big theatres, but which you could do in tiny spaces as
well.”
The
sort of spaces Kelly is talking about are exactly where the north-London born
writer began his play-writing career after joining a local youth theatre while
a teenager working in Sainsbury’s. His first play of note, Debris, was staged
at the tiny Theatre 503, situated above a Battersea pub, in 2003. He came to
further prominence two years later when After The End was seen at the Traverse
Theatre in Edinburgh in a production directed by Roxana Silbert for the Paines
Plough Company.
By
2006, Kelly’s BBC Three sit-com, Pulling, co-written with Sharon Horgan, was en
route to being nominated for a BAFTA, while his 2009 stage play, Orphans,
premiered at the Traverse in a Birmingham Rep production directed by Silbert.
The same year saw the National Theatre of Scotland premiere Kelly’s play for children,
Our Teacher’s A Troll, while in 2013, Kelly wrote two series’ of the sadly
dropped TV drama, Utopia. With such a relatively left-field back catalogue, being
approached by the Royal Shakespeare Company, then led by former director of
Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, Michael Boyd, wasn’t really what Kelly expected to
happen next.
“When
the RSC came to me and said they wanted me to do a musical, I said I didn’t
have a clue about how to do that,” Kelly remembers. “I think they knew my work
from Debris and Our Teacher’s A Troll, and I wrote about three drafts and then
Matthew Warchus came on boards as director. They looked around exhaustively for
a composer, and as soon as I spoke to Matthew about Tim Minchin, I think he
knew he was the one.”
Minchin
is the Australian based performer, whose internationally renowned musical
comedy show, Darkside, was an Edinburgh hit in 2005, winning him what was then
the Perrier Comedy Award for best newcomer. By the time Kelly and Minchin’s
take on the story opened in Stratford in 2010, both had been through an
extensive development process.
“We
did four of these huge two-week workshops,” Kelly remembers, “and it was a lot
of work. I don’t really like workshops, to be honest. I find that stuff hard. The
first person I want to hear doing something I’ve written is the actor playing
the part, but with something this big you just have to get on with it and do
it.”
Kelly
reckons the entire process took about four years.
“Someone
said to me at the time that was ten per cent of my life,” he says.
Matilda
The Musical looks set to last a lot longer than that. Following its West End transfer,
the show opened on Broadway, and went on to win seven Olivier Awards – the most
ever won by a musical – and five Tony Awards. It has also toured Canada and
Australia prior to its current UK tour. Has such international success changed
things for Kelly?
“In
some ways it changed things,” he says, “and in some ways it didn’t. I’ve had a
show on for the last eight years, which feels strange. As a playwright you tend
to have a show on, then it closes and another one goes on, so it is different
with Matilda, but after all this time I don’t have a lot to do with it anymore.
I don’t think I’m a lot of use to it. I used to go in and maybe give a bit of
advice, but at some point you’ve got to step back and let them get on with it.
“How
I wanted to work didn’t change. It’s not like this was what I was working
towards, meeting famous people and swanning round musical theatre or anything
like that. I still write grimy little plays, and always have done, and writing
Matilda was no different from writing anything else I’ve done.”
Such
a down to earth approach is part of Matilda’s appeal.
“There
are two things I really like about it,” Kelly says. “The first is Matilda’s
inability to accept the status quo, and secondly, she doesn’t whinge about it.
A lot of the time in musicals, people say, oh, if only this or that happened, I
could have done this. Matilda never really does that. She just gets on with it
and sorts things out. I think as well it’s a bit cheeky and a bit naughty as a
musical. The great thing about Roald Dahl is he’s rude, and I’m rude as well,
and so is Tim, so it all came together because we’re all rude. But apart from
anything else, it’s amazing seeing that little girl telling the story, and
holding 1,000 people or a couple of thousand people, in the palm of their hand.”
Kelly’s
forte charting the adventures of unruly small people has continued with his
version of Pinocchio, which he wrote for the National Theatre in London in a
production that ran in 2017 and 2018 directed by John Tiffany, formerly of the
Traverse and National Theatre of Scotland. In this way, Kelly seems naturally
drawn to such fictional trouble-makers.
“Being
able to watch someone who is very small overpower someone who is very big,
that’s not a bad message,” he says. “I learnt very early on, kids hate things
that aren’t fair. If you tell a kid off and you’re wrong, they hate it. There’s
something about fairness. In daily life it’s easy to put fairness aside in
order to get what we want, and in some ways that sort of thing is happening
more, but as far as Matilda goes, I just love the idea that there’s a little
girl out there who gets up and sorts things out. We could probably do with a
bit of that in the world just now.”
Matilda
The Musical, The Playhouse, Edinburgh, tonight-April 27.
The Herald, April 2nd 2019
ends
Comments