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Matilda the Musical

The Playhouse, Edinburgh

Five stars

 

World Book Day arriving on the same day as the official Edinburgh opening of the latest tour of Dennis Kelly and Tim Minchin’s epic stage musical of Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel was a perfect piece of synchronicity. Matilda, after, all, features one of the most bookish heroines ever imagined. 

 

Inexplicably born into a family of knockabout telly addicts, five-year-old Matilda Wormwood buries herself in books, with her precocious intellect channelling increasingly fantastical tales of acrobats and escapologists that she tells to Esther Niles’ librarian, Mrs Phelps. At school, meanwhile, Matilda is caught between the nurturing hand of Tessa Kadler’s angelic Miss Honey and the brutal regime of Richard Hurst’s monstrous Miss Trunchbull. Somehow Matilda quietly inspires her fellow pupils to rise up as she discovers the value of defiance early on.

 

Dahl’s tale of a damaged little girl who finds salvation through a mix of knowledge, imagination and a little telekinetic cheekiness is transformed in Matthew Warchus’s Royal Shakespeare Company production into a dark wonderland of sound and vision.

This is brought to life by an all singing, all dancing cast led by four rotating squads of well-honed child performers. Along with the show’s grown-up ensemble, they cavort in breathless unity on set designer Rob Howell’s cartoon-like giant library, framed by oversize blocks of letters that look part Scrabble, part kids’ TV show. 

 

There are some wonderfully realised setpieces that stem from Kelly’s audaciously playful book and the lyrical cheek of Minchin’s showtunes. These include the Miss Trunchbull seemingly hurling Matilda’s classmate Amanda through the air by her pigtails. Trunchbull’s ribbon dance too is part terrifying, part hilarious in its execution by Hurst, whose dramatic singing voice at points sounds not unlike that of Peter Hammill of British prog stalwarts, Van der Graaf Generator. 

 

And if that classroom shutdown orchestrated by Miss Trunchbull isn’t referencing Polish theatre guru Tadeusz Kantor’s The Dead Class, then I’ll stuff myself with even more chocolate cake than Matilda’s classmate Bruce is forced to gorge on as punishment for stealing one. Best of all is the glorious spelling bee Spartacus moment, as Trunchbull’s empire starts to fall. 

 

Through all the theatrical largesse, and with the regimented burl of Peter Darling’s choreography at its core, Matilda’s real story is one of unflinching triumph over the bullying and grasping institutional selfishness of Miss Trunchbull, and the sheer stupidity of her family. 

 

Adam Stafford’s Wormwood is a Flash Harry style spiv, Rebecca Thornhill’s less than devoted spouse a Latin dancing Barbie, and Samuel Leon’s baseball capped elder brother a surly teen who recalls Harry Enfield’s Kevin and Perry. While social services probably should have instigated an intervention on the Wormwoods a long, long time ago, Matilda somehow survives the lot of them.

 

On Thursday night, it was Madison Davis’s turn to play Matilda, which she did with a fearless panache, holding the stage as her own with the confidence of the seasoned professional she already is. After fifteen years of the show touring the globe and several generations of young performers having graduated through it, Matilda may be just a story, but its happy ending is a joy to behold.


The Herald, March 7th 2026

 

ends

 

 

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