Roald Dahl's Matilda comes to Birmingham stage

It’s the best of the West End. And – for one summer only – we can enjoy it at West Midland prices. Roald Dahl’s brilliant, multi-award-winning Matilda the Musical will play to tens of thousands of people when it visits Birmingham’s Hippodrome Theatre from July 3 to September 8.

Following a successful world premiere at Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2010, the Royal Shakespeare Company production transferred to London, where it continues to play to this day.

And with celebrations in full swing for World Book Day, there could be no better show to look forward to.

West End star Craige Els will reprise his role of the evil Miss Trunchbull, having played her in London for three years. And he will be joined by Carly Thoms as Miss Honey and Sebastian Torkia and Rebecca Thornhill as Mr and Mrs Wormwood. The role of Matilda will be shared by Annalise Bradbury, Lara Cohen, Poppy Jones and Nicola Turner.

Craige is looking forward to taking the show to the Hippodrome, having played at the Cambridge Theatre, in London, from 2014 to 2017. And he hopes people make the connection between World Book Day and the genius of Roald Dahl.

“Every year that World Book Day comes around I get excited, particularly with the work we’re doing with Matilda the Musical. I was part of that Roald Dahl generation. There’d been Enid Blyton before and there have been other successful people, like JK Rowling, but Roald Dahl, for me, was the master. He wrote incredible characters and his body of work featured everything from The Twits to Danny, the Champion of the World or Matilda. It was perfect, perfect literature.”

Like many adults, Craige grew up reading Roald Dahl’s work. It gave him a window into another world, fuelling his imagination. Once he’d discovered one book, he moved onto the next and the next and the next. He found they were all just as brilliant.

“My favourite was George’s Marvellous Medicine. I just found it fascinating and so dark as well. That was the genius of Roald’s literature, for me. You have so much fun reading them but there’s some really dark elements to all of his writing.”

Matilda has a dark story of its own. In essence, it’s a classic storyline of good versus evil. It features Roald, described by The Times as ‘without question the most successful children’s writer in the world’, in peak form.

Craige says: “You have the best of the good and the purest of the pure in Matilda and then I’m the lucky person who gets to be the baddest of the bad by playing Miss Trunchbull. It’s a brilliant role. It’s a real treat for an actor to play because she’s so grotesque. She’s so maniacal. Obviously, I have to find a reason to love her and justify everything that she does, which is the hard part. But it’s so much fun.

“I guess my sympathies for Miss Trunchbull lie in my own backstory that I’ve created for her. So, personally, as an actor I’ve found reasons why she is so dark and twisted and why she seems to have so much malevolence and why she despises children so much.”

Matilda is big business. It has been seen by an astonishing 7.7 million people worldwide while playing in more than 60 cities. There have been 5,500 performances around the globe and the show swept the board at the 2012 Olivier Awards, with a record-breaking seven awards. The show is truly international and will have its first non-English language production at the LG Arts Centre, in Seoul, South Korea, from September 2018 to February 2019.

Craige is thrilled to have played a part. “The show has been in the West End for seven years and we’re about to tour it again, opening in Leicester next month before moving around the UK and heading to Birmingham. It’s already been in North America, Australia and New Zealand.

“It’s a big show. I’m really excited to be coming to Birmingham for the summer. It’s a beautiful space, a beautiful theatre and a beautiful city. I’ve worked here a few times before. I record a radio series in Birmingham, it’s always a treat to come to the city.”

Craige brings considerable talent to the role of Miss Trunchbull. A talented performer, he has extensive theatre, TV, film and radio credits, featuring in works by numerous works by Shakespeare, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard through to lighter musicals.

“I’ve been really lucky to be able to dip my toe into lots of different styles of acting as well as doing radio, bits and bobs of TV and some film. “I’ve been lucky enough to do musicals as well as straight theatre. It’s rare when that happens, so I feel very fortunate. It keeps me on my toes. I never trained in singing or dancing. It all came to me as a new thing when I first started to do musicals. That’s when I fell in love with them. Every time they come around, I think ‘Yes please, I’d like to do that’.”

The story, however, was the star attraction when he first audition for Matilda. Having grown up on Roald, he was hungry to feature in one of the author’s works.

“One of the things the show does really well is engage with children. In the same way that you could pick up a Roald Dahl book now and enjoy it as an adult or a child, the show is very much on the same lines. The adults will enjoy it on one level and the children will enjoy it on another. It’s perfect for everybody, really.

“I read the book before I started rehearsals, but it’s not a carbon copy of the book, it’s just based on the book. We had the fantastic Dennis Kelly writing the script with Tim Minchin writing the music and lyrics. They managed somehow to get a really Dahlian aspect to the script and songs. The old story knits so well with their beautiful take on it.

“They manage to encapsulate Roald and contemporised it for now. The lyrics are so clever. The detail in the writing is so dark and Dahlian, it’s a real joy.”