MATILDA THE MUSICAL COMES TO SUNDERLAND EMPIRE
Royal Shakespeare Company's Multi-Award-Winning Production Celebrates 15 Years on Stage
Interview: Marianka Swain
This anarchic production about a strong and determined heroine with a vivid imagination has won over 100 global awards, including 24 for Best Musical. The internationally renowned musical continues to play to packed houses in the West End at the Cambridge Theatre and has been seen by 12 million people across 100 cities around the world.
Meet the Cast
Madison Davis, Mollie Hutton, Olivia Ironmonger and Sanna Kurihara will share the title role of Matilda, with Richard Hurst playing the terrifying Miss Trunchbull, Tessa Kadler as the kind Miss Honey, Adam Stafford as Mr Wormwood and Rebecca Thornhill as Mrs Wormwood.
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| Tim Minchin with Tour Matildas - L-R Olivia Ironmonger, Mollie Hutton, Sanna Kurihara and Madison Davis Phot: Phil Tragen |
They are joined by Scotty Armstrong, Sam Holden, Portia Jefferies, Caiomhe Judd, Brooke Kelly, Ryan Lay, Cassandra Lee, Samuel Leon, Jordan Maisuria-Wake, Nicole Manumbre, Lizzie Nance, Esther Niles, Jordan Ricketts, Josh Singleton, Bradley Trevethan, Ella Tweed, Ben Tyler and Karen Walker.
The talented young performers bringing the story to life include Rudy Bragg, Jacob Connor-Ashton, Charlie Cox, Sylvie Grace, Rose Jammeh, Dottie Jones, Takunda Khumalo, Sana Lennon, Oisin-Luca Pegg, Millie-May Mankowska, Tate Masuku, Leo Maurice, Carter-J Murphy, Jaxon James Nolan, Cole Nicholson, Pixie Pettigrew, Brodie Robson, Haiden Sihapanya and Felix Schmitt.
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| Tim Minchin with the Young Tour Cast of Matilda the Musical, 2025 Photo: Phil Tragen |
Tim Minchin, who wrote the music and lyrics for the musical, made a surprise visit to the rehearsal room this week to meet the young tour cast, demonstrating the enduring passion and care the creative team continue to invest in this remarkable production.
An Extraordinary British Success Story
Matilda is an extraordinary British success story, premiering in Stratford-upon-Avon in November 2010, and then transferring to the West End's Cambridge Theatre the following year. It won a record-breaking seven Olivier Awards and has played everywhere from Broadway to Australia. In 2022 it was adapted into a Netflix movie.
It's a level of success that continues to astonish its creative team, says Matthew Warchus, who also developed and directed Matilda. "None of us knew it would have the long life and the impact that it's had. You could never have predicted it."
However, Warchus vividly remembers the audience reaction to their first performance. "I'd had a few successes as a director, but as the show ended I had the strange feeling of 'Oh, I see, that's what a hit is.' There was an explosion of emotion. You looked around and saw people with tears running their cheeks and big smiles on their faces. It was like a cultural bomb going off."
The RSC had originally thought Matilda would be their short-run Christmas show. But the moment Warchus read playwright Dennis Kelly's adaptation, he knew "it was a much bigger prospect." He explains: "Dennis gave the source material such emotional heft. Most importantly, for a musical, it felt like there was a lot to sing about. I thought it could have an audience of not just young people but adults as well."
Creating Emotional Depth
Kelly, who grew up reading Dahl, immediately connected with Matilda as "a powerful hero." Still, he knew that the narrative needed to be fleshed out considerably. "I was quite lucky: I hit on this idea for Miss Honey's backstory, about an acrobat couple who want a child. It makes complete sense for Matilda to narrate it, since she's a storyteller, and it makes her more active: she sets up the whole climax."
Poignantly, notes Kelly, the tale Matilda creates is "about parents who love their child more than anything – in sharp contrast to what she's experiencing. I always get swept up in the emotion of that. I also love that she and Miss Honey form this unconventional family. We still don't see those enough in drama."
Honouring Dahl's Dark Humour
Matilda composer and lyricist Tim Minchin was passionate about honouring Dahl's distinctive tone. "One of the first things I said to Matthew was: please don't do a cute princess version." Minchin explains he always thinks of Quentin Blake's illustrations in Dahl's books, "which are disturbing and grotesque. When I went into Matilda, I brought my childhood bathed in dark, inky drawings and Dahl's revolting rhymes. It translated into a particular sound musically, which is quite angular."
Minchin adds: "If you want people to genuinely root for a character to overcome something, you have to give them real jeopardy. Kids understand monsters. Miss Trunchbull is such a great monster that at the end of the show, when the children are rebelling against her, we all feel like we've scaled a mountain."
Kelly got some crucial advice from Dahl's widow Felicity. "She invited me for lunch at her house and took me to see the shed where Dahl wrote. He had a chair with a hole in it because he had a bad back, and a sleeping bag he put on his knees to keep warm. She was very nice about my script, but she said did say, about the Trunchbull, 'You must remember she's a murderer.' It was her brilliantly subtle way of pointing out that I was having too much fun with the character, which stopped her being genuinely dangerous when we needed it. Perfect note."
The Magic of Child Performers
In the show's early workshops, recalls Warchus, the child characters were played by adults, which "increased the comedy quota a lot. Then we tried it with young actors: the irony and self-awareness vanished immediately. When Trunchbull or the Wormwoods shouted at Matilda, and she stood up to them defiantly and said 'Leave me alone, you big horrible bully!', something extraordinary happened. You felt transported back to your own childhood."
It created an unusual challenge for children's casting director Jessica Ronane. She began life as a dancer, and her first casting job was on Billy Elliot: The Musical. "They'd had such trouble casting the film and they didn't know if they'd be able to find that number of boys for the West End," she explains. "But I learnt from our brilliant choreographer Peter Darling, who then brought me onto Matilda, about the authenticity and energy that kids bring to a show."
Likewise, Matilda relies on a huge cast of young performers. "We have four Matilda's, four Bruce Bogtrotters, and then three for everyone else, like Lavender, Amanda, Nigel and Eric," says Ronane. "It's a big ask: the dance is hard and the vocals are incredibly complicated. Like Bruce does this amazing falsetto riff, because our original Bruce had just been in the Michael Jackson Thriller musical and Tim was excited to use his massive high range. Now we have to replicate that!"
Ronane says she can quickly spot promising kids in auditions. "It's a combination of having the energy to attack it and the skill to maintain it. The Matilda's might not be the kid pushing to the front of the room, but they're smart and they have inner steel."
There are practical considerations too. "We have a specific height range, so you have to predict their growth over the next six months," explains Ronane. "The boys' voices might change. Matilda has to be physically small for the story to work."
She notes that the Matilda team is proactive in looking beyond stage schools, whether it's sticking up a poster in the local sports centre or approaching a choir.
Kelly says audiences always fall in love with 'their' Matilda. "You talk to people who've seen it and they go 'I know there's four of them, but our one was the best.'"
Never Talking Down to the Audience
Notably, the musical never talks down to its young audience. That's very deliberate, explains Minchin. "Matilda is obviously gifted, so we couldn't write a show where the protagonist is anything less than a genius. If you don't believe kids can be brilliant, you can't really make Matilda."
Equally, he loves the silliness – which produces great big belly laughs from both children and adults. "Like the song says, sometimes you have to be a little bit naughty," quips Minchin. Kelly agrees: "It's a show that we experience together, not in our isolated little bubbles. We can all enjoy jokes like Bruce's epic burp."
A Distinctive Design
That combination is reflected in Rob Howell's wonderfully distinctive design, with its cluttered backdrop of Scrabble tiles (spelling out clues to the story) and alphabet blocks which are memorably stacked in "School Song" to illustrate Minchin's intricate letter puns. "It's clever but also fun and a bit messy, so it speaks to audiences of all ages and it immerses you totally in this heightened story-book world," says Warchus.
Playful set-pieces include the infamous "phys ed" lesson. That was in Kelly's script, says Warchus, "but we didn't know the extent of the gymnastics that the kids and Miss Trunchbull would be able to manage. It's a real thrill to discover that our Trunchbulls can do this huge vault, eight shows a week."
It took more experimenting to figure out how the Trunchbull could swing poor Amanda Thripp around by her pigtails. "We tried with a dummy, which was the jokey version, and I kept asking if it could be done for real," says Warchus. "The kids actually love being swung around."
The cast also adore flying out into the auditorium on giant swings during the number "When I Grow Up". It's now an iconic moment in the show but it came late in the day, recalls Warchus. "We were thinking about a roundabout or alphabet cubes. It was Peter Darling who had the brainwave and said, 'Let's try swings.'"
It might sound simple but it requires absolute precision, notes Warchus. "Peter worked out that the length of the ropes has to coincide with the number of beats in a bar for the pendulum point to be in the right place, in order to swing in time with the song. So wherever in the world the production plays, that measurement is sacrosanct."
A Show About Justice and Standing Up
Alongside the fun, Kelly notes that the show captures "children's burning sense of justice: 'That's not right'. Matilda doesn't just use her skills to help herself – she stands up for others. She's a great role model."
Ronane's favourite moment is when Matilda sings "Quiet". It's extraordinary, she says, "watching this little girl hold the audience in the palm of her hand. The music is transporting and gorgeous, and it's the kind of shared experience you can only have in the theatre." Kelly concurs, noting: "Tim is a very intelligent, funny guy, but what underpins his music is emotion. His kids were quite young when we made this and you can feel his love of being a dad."
Warchus says he feels a great affinity with Matilda since he similarly didn't fit in as a kid. "But I was never as courageous as her. I find that inspiring because it's a quality I lack." He continues: "I got bullied a lot at school, and creative imagination wasn't generally nurtured (with the exception of a couple of great teachers: Beryl Nairn and Tony Norris). For me, Matilda is a revenge show. It's a way of fighting back against all the Trunchbulls in my life who said 'You can't do this.' That's ridiculous because creativity isn't just a route to escapism – it can transform the world."
Kelly says he would have been closest to Eric as a kid, "someone who was lucky to have been hanging out with Matilda", while Ronane was like Lavender: "A feisty best friend." Minchin relates to naughty Nigel. "He runs on stage saying 'Hide me, someone put treacle on Miss Trunchbull's chair and she thinks it's me but I never'. Well I reckon he did!"
A Family Affair
The team have all had the pleasure of sharing Matilda with their own children. Warchus's three kids, now aged 17, 19 and 21, watched those early Stratford rehearsals since his wife Lauren Ward was the original Miss Honey. "I always had one child on my lap and one squished up next to me, and I had to stop them calling out 'Mummy!' every time Miss Honey came on stage. They've grown up with it."
Kelly recalls that he was married to his first wife at the time, and she didn't want children. "We don't talk about the male biological clock. But when I look at Matilda now, I see the story of the circus couple who desperately want a child – that's who I was. Now that I'm a father, I have a whole other connection to it." He's eager for his five-year-old daughter Kezia to see it. "Her friends talk about it at school and she knows it has something to do with me."
That's actually a turnoff for Minchin's children, he says wryly. "My kids are pathologically interested in everything but my work." But he thinks his daughter Violet "turned out to be a Matilda – she's a kid with a pretty interesting brain."
Back on the Road
Ronane is delighted that Matilda is going back on the road. "I remember the last tour when we opened in Leicester, seeing it in that new space was incredible. Every theatre brings a different energy to it."
Kelly saw the show several times on its last tour. Minchin visited it in Leicester and is hoping to catch it in one of his favourite venues, the Playhouse Theatre in Edinburgh.
Warchus, who's originally from Selby in North Yorkshire, recalls seeing touring shows "in Manchester, Hull, Leeds and Bradford. That's how I fell in love with theatre. I'm proud that Matilda's standards on tour are enormously high – you're getting the full bells-and-whistles production."
Celebrating 15 years is "absolutely incredible," says Minchin. "It's my proudest, proudest achievement." Warchus feels the same way. "Matilda has got so much of me in it. It would be my favourite thing even if it had been a flop. The fact that it's gone on to do all these amazing things and impact so many people is something I think we all find very moving and very humbling - the way all our efforts came together and fused, it's a kind of miracle."
About the Production
Written by Dennis Kelly, with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin and developed and directed by Matthew Warchus, the production is designed by Rob Howell, with choreography by Peter Darling, orchestrations, additional music and musical supervision by Christopher Nightingale, lighting by Hugh Vanstone, sound by Simon Baker and special effects and illusions by Paul Kieve.
Matilda The Musical swept the board at the 2012 Olivier Awards, with a record-breaking seven awards, and won four Tony Awards and a Tony Honor for Excellence in the Theater for the four girls sharing the title role on Broadway. It has since toured North America, Australia, New Zealand, the UK and Ireland, South Africa and China and played its first non-English language production in Seoul, South Korea in 2018/19. In 2023, Matilda The Musical played for the first time in Japan.
A film adaptation made by the core creative team received its World Premiere at the London Film Festival in October 2022 and can now be watched on Netflix.
Tickets:
Matilda The Musical will be at Sunderland Empire from Wednesday 11 – Saturday 28 February 2026.
Tickets are available from £15 online now at ATGTickets.com/Sunderland
*A £3.95 transaction fee may apply to online bookings.
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