Matilda (PG)
The RSC have past form for sponsoring inventive and - by the way - hugely commercial musicals by assembling inspired creative teams.
With Matilda, Dennis Kelly's original story-within-a-story, and Tim Minchin's genius with a song arguably enhanced the source material; Roald Dahl's tale of a neglected but gifted child who is helped by her empathetic but bullied teacher.
Like Les Miserables it gets the big screen treatment here with original director Matthew Warchus adeptly flipping the story from page to stage to screen in a film that fizzes with visual flourishes, cartoonish colour, and rebellious energy.
Dahl's characters are hardly subtle; Matilda's abusive parents (Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseboro both having fun) are caricature working class philistines who mock her bookishness, and Emma Thompson's hammer-throwing headmistress Miss Trunchbull is a butch bully with no redeeming back story.
In Alisha Weir's sparky Matilda they meet an underdog with the telekinetic powers to exact revenge and as Minchin's metatheatrical lyrics explain 'change my story'.
What book, musical and film joyfully celebrate is childish anarchy against tyranny, and the talented young performers who rampage and dance through Trunchbull's ghastly Crunchem Hall singing 'We Are Revolting Children,' or daydreaming about 'When I Grow Up,' are rightly trusted to carry the film.
Lashana Lynch's sweet Miss Honey does however get a back story, amplified by Kelly into a powerful fable about a pair of doomed acrobats which book-loving Matilda recounts episodically on the roof of a mobile library.
Minchin's lyrics insighfully evoke the confidence crushing timidity of the unloved Miss Honey, and get inside the head of neurodiverse Matilda. Their touching bond provides the crucial emotional backbone to a film that also has great fun with Thompson's memorably monstrous Trunchbull.
From her diving boots to Big Brother surveillance and Soviet-style statue of Olympic glory - Inscription: No Snivelling - to her exit (not in the book) which visually recalls Dahl's Great Glass Elevator smashing through the Chocolate factory roof, a heavily prosthetic-ed Thomson is on great form.
The force-feeding of chocolate-loving Bruce Bogtrotter and freewheeling fate of Amanda Thripp are despatched with as much relish as her psychotic one-liners.
Much like Paddington, the eccentrically British humour makes a movie that parents will relish as much as their children.
Director: Matthew Warchus. Starring: Alisha Weir, Emma Thompson, Lashana Lynch, Stephen Graham, Andrea Riseborough. In cinemas. Running time: 117 minutes.
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