Thinking a way through Life with Matilda (the Musical)

In 'The Art of Travel', the author, Alain de Botton points out that his disappointment in his long awaited tropical get away was mainly due to the fact "that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the Island." He completely bought into the poster image of the white sand, waving palms and blue arc of the bay and expected some miracle to occur that would transform him into half of the happy, carefree couple strolling down the beach. Well miracles do happen but I think in this instance a bit of Cognitive therapy would be more effective.

Really - We are what we think!

The stage design was of alphabet blocks with words hidden sneakily around, sliding bookshelves and pop up desks, so things were looking good. (A blurry, sneaky half time shot of the stage.)

Because of this mind set I absolutely loved Dennis Kelly's(Adapted the story line for stage) and Tim Minchin's(Wrote the music and lyrics) musical version of Roald Dahl's Matilda. I must admit to feeling VERY tense as we entered the Cambridge Theatre in Covent Garden.  Matilda the novel, is my favourite of Dahl's work and I hated the thought of it being handled clumsily. I love the Dani Devito movie adaption so thought I could stomach the risk. www.roalddahlmuseum.org shares 'the stories behind the stories' and had this to say about Matilda.
"As a writer Roald was a perfectionist and he often went through many drafts of his books. Matilda was no exception.  He started writing it when he was seventy.  The first draft took him nearly a year to complete and it was characteristically daring and original.  But it was not right.  Matilda herself for example, was a rather unattractive character, who was eventually killed. 'I had awful trouble with that first draft,' Roald later admitted. 'The main character, the little girl, kept changing.' So as he had done before he went back to the drawing board and rewrote it.  When the final version was published it was an immediate success.  He died two years later, in 1990 with unfinished stories still left in his writing hut."

The musical has none of the long suffering sweetness that the movie chose to portray. Kelly's Matilda was feisty and had a good pair of yelling lungs. The first song oozes with befuddled parents insisting that their little miracle is the only child to be so special - they have no eyes - or lenses for any other. Matilda's mother meanwhile curses 'her stingy front bottom' and the shock of 'what another one?' and the brilliant James Clyde playing her father is disgusted that his wife has made one without a 'think of as many colloquial synonyms for penis as you can and you might get close'.  This unloved child has an IQ 40x the combined efforts of the rest of her family and recognises the injustice of her treatment while simultaneously craving their approval. Her first advice to the audience is - "You are writing your own story, if you don't change what they are doing - you are saying it is Okay. Sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty!"

Mr Kelly says in the programme that 'watching someone writing a book on stage would be about as interesting as eating sprouts.' (The English seem to have a love hate relationship with this wee cabbage.) The change he made from Matilda's love of reading being extended to a love of story telling added dimension and empowered the original themes of the novel.

As the tiny actress - Elise Blake (there are several girls who share the role but she was our Matilda) spat out Tim Minchin's rhythms and words with clarity and attitude I felt such a weird sense of a parallel universe.  I have not been lucky enough to see this Aussie wizard in a live performance but have watched most of his work on TV.  It was as if this little girl were channeling Minchin; her pitch and dynamics so exactly mimicked him. Even her hair was all mussed up, in a young Herminone Granger sort of way to suggest neglect, and looked like she was sporting Minchin's dread locks - however she wore a lot less eye make up than him! Minchin believes that "without stories we are just eating machines with shoes."

Because young Matilda chose to think about solutions rather than the problems she conquered her fears, found love and truth and inspired others to do the same. Here are some quotes that might help us think through our days - one way or another:

• My mummy says I'm a miracle (Hope she does and if she's gone hope you remember that she did! If you're the mummy, don't fake it - they know when they've done well or not) First Song.
• Cover yourself in Chocolate Glory.  For Bruce Bogtrotter
• Even if you're little, you can do a lot. Matilda
• If it's not right you have to put it right.  Matilda
• Nobody but me is going to change my story - sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty.  Matilda
• Life's a ball so learn to throw it. Trunchbull
• You gotta be Loud Mrs Wormwood
• The bigger the Telly - the Smarter the Man Mr Wormwood - so glad his little finger metaphors did not carry on through the whole piece.
• When I grow up, I will be smart enough to know the answers to all the questions you need to know the answers to, before you grow up. This circular philosophy pull at the heart strings served with a swinging chorus.

From the Royal Shakespeare Company website.

In the novel, the Trunchbull (antagonist - principal and evil aunt to Miss Honey, devisor of the wicked chokey and father killer) is easily hateable but the way Alex Gaumond (a very tall gentleman with lovely knobbly knees hanging below his short gym skirt!) plays her, one almost feels convinced that children are indeed maggots and brainwashing through intense Phys-ed is perhaps the only way to deal with them. She is definitely a comic baddie. A live version of Dahl's Trunchbull would give the children and adults in the audience nightmares for the rest of their lives.                                                                   Trunchbull Quotes:  "To teach the child we must break the child", "There is an age for reading and an age for being a filthy little toad." Not ideas I would recommend.

If you want to read a lot more detail about the musical have a look at http://www.timminchin.com/matilda/ 

If you are thinking of going - book well ahead of time!


A very funny article by Minchin about how Matilda the musical came about and how he feels about it opening to play in Sydney - Australia.  http://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/tim-minchin-im-bringing-matilda-the-musical-home-20150521-ggx58q.html

Tartar Sauce and Manchester Caviar 

Seven Dials is a tiny intersection where 6 roads meet.  The Cambridge Theatre is on one corner and the Scoff and Banter restaurant that we went to dinner at is on another. It was traditional English food a little bit posh.  My cheese and onion pasties with creamed spinach had the spinach inside the pastry, a potato and onion mash underneath and a cheese sauce to smother it all in a little jug. M ordered Fish and Chips which listed Tartar sauce and Manchester caviar as accompaniments.  He was disappointed that there were no mushy peas but upon delivery his brow smoothed with delight to find that the city had been insulted and mushy peas had been renamed.  Thinking about a substance differently did not alter the taste in this case.

The Tate Modern. Willow asked - why does modern so often mean ugly?
See the similarity to the old factory close to our house - Picture right - Cambridge Tech Museum
Previously the water works - our landmark

Inside the Tate Modern - shop to the left, ticket queue for Exhibitions to the right.

St Paul's behind, the Tate in front - View from the Millennium bridge. The sky is trying to let spring in.

St Paul's through the Tate Birch grove

The Globe Theater - book waaaay in advance!

They keep complaining about having to pose for photos so I took some sneaky over the shoulder shots.
Am quite surprised that the subjects were captured - even with a bit of ear!

Art Attack - The close air and crowds of art galleries make Willow feel sick and Petal would rather be doing it than looking at it; so a special thanks to the patience of my family and for supporting my interests and coming along on this visit.

We went to the Tate Modern's Paul Klee Exhibition. 

I love looking at Art to see how other people think through their world.

By the end of High school Paul Klee was professional standard violinist but chose to move away from Switzerland to Munich in order to free himself from his musical parent's expectations. After a tour in Italy he got a bit overwhelmed and depressed because he felt everything brilliant had been done and he knew his drawing skills were not comparable to the renaissance men.  His love for composition and colour and his philosophical attitude towards life soon etched out a cubby for his place in the art world though and he experienced fame and fortune within his lifetime.  He was a little bit abstract (friends with Kandinsky) a little bit cubist and a little surreal. He numbered his works from the first through to the last so art historians love him.  Close artist friends died fighting in WW1. He escaped by being given the task of painting numbers and symbols on the planes of Germany's first air force. In WWII Hitler denounced him as a degenerative artist so he fled to Switzerland with his wife and son. 

My favourite pieces shown have been copied from various sites because we were not allowed to photograph in the exhibition.

Reading Now:

The Art of Travel by Alain deBotton

This modern day Swiss/Brit philosopher has conjured up a think about why and how we travel rather than where.

"It was the fate of ' questing souls' like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm." Baudelaire reference p35.

"Anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thus lend to life a vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting wooliness of the present."  p15

"...my eyes were bewildered at their freedom...they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random impatient patterns."  p186 Perhaps an apt description of Willow's response in the Klee exhibition.

"Velaquez had not invented such effects, many would have witnesses them before him, but few had had the energy or talent to capture them and turn them into communicable experience.  Like an explorer with a new continent, Velaquez had, for Van Gogh at least, given his name to a discovery in the world of light... It was for Van Gogh the mark of every great painter to allow us to see certain aspects of the world more clearly."  p190

"No painting ever captures the whole, as Nietzsche mockingly pointed out in a bit of doggerel verse:

The Realistic Painter

'Completely true to nature!' - what a lie:

How could nature ever be constrained into a picture?

The smallest bit of nature is infinite!

And so he paints what he likes about it.

And what does he like?  He likes what he can paint!"  p192

de Botton quotes Nietzsche again "We are tempted to divide mankind into a minority of those who know how to make much of little and a majority of those who know how to make little of much." p253.

How similar is this sentiment to the often quoted saying of St David (Welsh patron Saint whose day - March 1st was celebrated at St John's Messy Church this weekend. 'Be Joyful and Keep Faith in the Little Things.'