Music and the mind of Tim Minchin
Comedian and songwriter Tim Minchin talks to Alison Jones about the logical side of his belated success
"There are moments in this play where I challenge you not to tear up and there are moments where I defy you not to laugh.
“Am I allowed to be that cocky?” queries comic and musician Tim Minchin.
As the songwriter for Matilda the Musical, the Christmas show being staged by the RSC at Stratford-upon-Avon, a significant portion of the success of the production lies on his dishevelled head.
But it was a job he was fated to do, having had the idea for turning the Roald Dahl story, about a bright little girl who uses telepathy and telekinesis to get revenge on the awful adults who make her life a misery, into a musical more than a decade ago.
He went as far as enquiring about rights and was invited to send in his score by the RSC.
“I thought, well, I am not going to write the bloody thing and then find out I don’t have the rights, so I let it go.”
When, years later, he got invited to have a meeting with the RSC about a musical project, he assumed that it was for a sound track interpretation of a Shakespeare play.
“But Matthew Warchus (the production’s director) said ‘Have you heard of Roald Dahl’s Matilda because we are trying to adapt it into a stage musical’. I opened my mouth and didn’t close it for 25 minutes. I just banged on.
"Then Matthew said thank you, in his quiet unassuming way, and I walked out. It was an incredible coincidence. I eventually made the decision if they didn’t give me the job I would probably hunt them down or something.”
Tim, 35, admits he is passionate about Dahl, having read his books as a child, occasionally terrifying himself in the process.
“I think it’s inexorably connected to the Quentin Blake-ian inkiness of the drawings. I remember The Twits being too scary for me – I think I read it when I was really young – there is this sense of tenseness and wrongness of the world. Everyone is tricking each other and there’s mean people.
“There is this sort of casual Dahl-ness that allowed him to get away with stuff that you can’t when you are on stage. We had to try and find a balance.
"So when Matilda gets locked in her room we really care about her and want her to be okay. Similarly with Miss Honey (the kindly teacher who is tyrannised by her aunt, Miss Trunchbull) you have to understand that she is a victim of massive child abuse without going ‘this is a play about child abuse’.”
Known best over here as a comedian for whom music is an integral part of his act, Tim had been writing music for theatre for many years back in Australia.
He was born in the UK, in Northampton, but grew up in Perth. He started learning piano when he was young and began writing songs with his brother.
As a teenager he penned music for Shakespearean productions. He also dabbled in acting and played in a covers band.
However, he found his ambition to be a rock or pop star sabotaged by his own compulsion to write “clever dick songs”
“I made a self financed album in 2000 which had songs called Nothing Changes and Happy Boy that were really sentimental, sort of Tori Amos, Ben Folds influenced.
“Then I had songs like Who Is the Fella This Week, Bitch? and My Heart Belongs To An 18 Year Old Lesbian.
“I got the impression it was confusing the record companies. I had a couple go, ‘well you can obviously write songs but are you a novelty act or not?’
“In 2003 I put together a show of just my sillier stuff in the hope I’d kind of expunge myself of them so I could get on with being a rock musician.
