Why Tim Minchin's MATILDA makes Miss Trunchbull the hero

I am going to write more about the process through which I am adapting E. Nesbit's short story "Melisande: or, Long and Short Division" into a musical, but before we get to that – well, first, I have to continue adapting it, and second, I want to demonstrate what can happen when an interpreter gets an adaptation wrong.

I do mean wrong, by the way.

Not better-or-worse as it might fit onto some continuum.

Wring-wrang-wrong.

So let's take a look at the musical adaptation of MATILDA.

In Roald Dahl's Matilda, originally published in 1988, Agatha Trunchbull is a hilariously uncomplicated villain. Her over-the-top cruelty is both horrific and delightful, as are the various revenges attempted by her students. It is clear that Miss Trunchbull wishes to squish and dominate the people around her simply because she is bigger and stronger than they are – and children, understanding that explanation intuitively, do not need any further embellishment.

In Tim Minchin's MATILDA: THE MUSICAL (yes, musical titles are capitalized, deal with it), Miss Trunchbull is given a backstory that inadvertently makes her the hero of the entire narrative.

I cannot imagine that Tim Minchin or his writing partner Dennis Kelly intended this to happen. I mean, I kinda-sorta-can, knowing what I know about Minchin's previous work, but I can't seriously believe that he meant to subvert Dahl's text to the point at which we are obliged to sympathize with a tyrant.

And yet the introduction of the Acrobat and the Escapologist – two characters that did not exist in Dahl's book – changes the entire story.

In Dahl's Matilda, Agatha Trunchbull murders her brother Magnus nominally so she can take possession of his home but fundamentally because she's bigger and stronger than he is, and that's what she does. Bullies bully, and bully for them. Kids get this. The murder part doesn't even register because the story is already so ridiculous. (I read Matilda over and over as a child, and never once imagined how Magnus might have been killed. It was much more fun to imagine how I could withstand the Chokey, or whether I could move chalk with my mind.)

In Minchin/Kelly's MATILDA: THE MUSICAL, we not only know how Agatha murders Magnus – with her own two hands, in cold blood – but we also learn why.

The best way for me to explain all of this is to share the monologue I wrote when I was auditioning for Miss Trunchbull at our local community theater. I was obviously not going to get the part (I'm 5'2" and 115 lbs, although I do have a three-octave range), but the way the character was portrayed in the musical fascinated me and so I had to explore her to what became an inevitably heroic conclusion.

I use the word "hero" the same way Herbert Croly and Hannah Arendt do, by the way. A hero is a person who solves problems.

Quick backstory for those of you who only know the book: Magnus, Agatha's brother in the book, becomes her brother-in-law in the musical. Instead of being a doctor who owns his own home, he is now a moderately impoverished Escapologist who is married to an Acrobat who is later revealed to be Agatha Trunchbull's sister (updated to stepsister in the Netflix movie version).

The rest of the story tells itself, as best as I can tell it – and everything in the monologue you are about to read derives directly from the events of MATILDA: THE MUSICAL.