Matilda the Musical - Lost in Adaptation
For my first article as our local musical fanatic, I wanted to showcase one of my personal favourites and explain how and why it works, by comparing Matilda the Musical on stage with the recent 2022 movie musical adaptation. This will be a spoiler-free review, going over some of the adaptation choices, regarding adaptation for intended audiences, and one of the biggest flaws that snuck in during the adaptation process.
Who is it for?
The original book by Roald Dahl was intended for kids, to see a little girl who loves reading, overcomes difficult situations, and wants things to be just. Putting her in a very unjust environment that gets resolved by the end, through compassion and a little smart problem-solving (and telekinesis). By this point, so many adults grew up on it, or at least the 1996 movie with Danny DeVito, that it’s become a staple even outside of those who read the book.
The stage musical adapted the book freshly, picking scenes that are iconic and mixing it with commentary on how kids are often treated, while creating a genuinely impactful story about child self-empowerment and adults still having to deal with difficult situations that can make them feel small. The vibes are immaculate and Matilda’s family, the Wormwoods, are ridiculous enough to bring a brighter atmosphere and add some adult humour, to balance out the frankly terrifying headmistress, the Trunchbull. A colourful and fun performance with a beautiful set, that can make kids and adults laugh and cry, which makes it a perfect family experience.
Then there is the movie musical. I don’t enjoy bashing things, and it did do some things well, like the singers being pretty decent, or some of the imagery during the song Quiet or Revolting Children, but oh does the adaptation struggle with who it is for. Opening with the words “To change the world it needs a little genius” is already a choice (TM), but I guess you can whittle the idea down from compassion and community to one special person fixing it all, even if it weakens the story’s moral. They cut essentially all of the adult commentary and jokes, reduced the Wormwood’s screentime and plot that added a lot of needed light-heartedness to balance out the school storyline, and weakened the connection between Matilda and her teacher Miss Honey by cutting a good chunk of her story. It feels like they wanted to make this a children’s movie and forgot what children are halfway through, making Matilda a hero protagonist with superpowers, rather than a little girl who is clever and can levitate a glass of water or some chalk. It’s a fine movie on its own, but you are missing so much, and it is a pretty poor adaptation.
I had to pause at certain points during the movie and just take in how the framing, combined with Netflix lighting, sometimes makes Matilda feel like a horror movie monster, with an exchange about the Trunchbull going verbatim
“I'm not scared of her!”
“You should be. She's dangerous.”
”So am I.”
Girl, you are five years old.
The Plot Thinnens
Let's first have a moment of silence for the characters we lost: Matilda’s brother and Mrs Wormwood’s part Italian dance partner Rudolpho. Admittedly Matilda’s brother in the stage version doesn’t add very much other than vague comic relief that gets uncomfortable when you realize that the joke is that he is portrayed as mentally disabled. I cannot fathom what led to this choice in the musical, and while getting rid of him gets rid of the unfunny joke, it does also take away from the Wormwood family dynamic. Matilda’s mom having a very loud hobby in dancing, while Matilda prefers the quiet, was a great way to show the differences between the family members when they aren’t actively interacting, especially when contrasted with Matilda’s favourite teacher, Miss Honey, visiting the same library as her.
Both of these got cut for the movie, and it made me wonder what else they cut.
The answer is: Lots of things! But this is where I run into constraints regarding spoilers. I don’t want you sitting here having me compare things you might not even know, so I’ll stick to some basic examples for now and promise that the same thing happens all over the place.
Using some early scenes that were famously in the older versions, Matilda messing with hair oil and putting glue in a hat, were both responses to things that Mr Wormwood did on stage in the musical. He’s a liar, boasting that everyone trusts people with good hair, so she ruined his hair for him, making the outside match the inside, mixing chemicals that were explicitly meant to be kept out of reach of children. That direct line from point A to B was missing, just like Matilda putting glue in his hat was a response to him telling her to glue a book to hers originally. It was robbed of context in the adaptation.
And that, my friends, is the key issue I have with the scripting of the adaptation. They kept all the big moments (important to specifically Matilda, other character moments often got cut completely), but it feels like they didn’t even know why the moments happened in the first place. The basic rules of setup and follow-through were thoroughly ignored. Chekhov would be disappointed.
There were only so many things I could say about this adaptation without ever touching on spoilers, and that 100% includes the music. So now go and listen to the stage musical, or look it up somewhere (TM) and get ready for a full spoiler music analysis in part two!
(Editor note: Part 2 of this article, with spoilers included, will come out soon!)
Written by Nic Treczoks, a dedicated Writing Committee member!
You can find Nic on Instagram: @nic_has_a_nac
Ibsen's First Steps
God was born small and crawling. Legendary Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, the second most performed playwright of all time after Shakespeare, went through at least 5 messy, derivative plays before he made something remotely worth considering. Or, at least that’s how the Great Narrative goes.
“Love’s Comedy,” Ibsen’s 8th play, is where the real fun starts. It’s the story of two guys who pursue two girls, one each. Falk and Lind, chasing Svanhild (named after a princess of legend) and Anna, respectively. Lind and Anna settle, all holy. Falk and Svanhild’s tryst unfolds differently. Falk’s a poet, an activist and… he’s looking for a muse. Svanhild marvels at his artistry a little, measures herself up. Measures him up, too. No, she tells Falk, I won’t be your muse, you can do your writing thing on your own. It’s liberation, really, abandoning the historic archetype relegation mechanism of all those artist types that wouldn’t just objectify you, they’d Generalize you, Mythify you, mutilate your personhood for the sake of metaphor. Enter: rich business guy. He tells Falk and Svanhild: your love will not last. The pair talk, really talk.
And decide he’s right. Crazy in love and utterly rational. Svanhild’s future is comfortable and miserable, by painstakingly conscious choice. Falk’s future is all about being out on his own, probably still doing his thing, pen and ink and tears and paper.
“Love’s Comedy” is widely considered to be Ibsen’s first real masterpiece. After it came “the Pretenders” (ignore that one), and then what is in my opinion the GOAT sequence of published plays. “A Doll’s House,” “Ghosts,” “Enemy of the People,” “Wild Duck,” “Romersholm,” “Hedda Gabler”. They’re all there.
So what was the darling protofeminist playwright’s deal before this historic run? Did he suck? Was “Love’s Comedy” a monumental pivot, a Beatles’ “Rubber Soul” moment?
When I started reading Ibsen’s stuff in order, it was from purely a completist impulse. I like diversity in my reading diet; I read, besides for fun, to expand my worldview and challenge my tastes. One day it hit me that maybe I was unfocused. Maybe I needed to really immerse myself in one particular author. Ibsen’s early works ended up serving both purposes. They gave me more focused insight into the Norwegian’s obsessions and quirks. They also proved challenging and taste-expanding.
It isn’t easy reading clunkily translated 19th century verse. It takes some time getting into a setting of 16th century Norway and its geopolitical conflict with Denmark. Most of Ibsen’s early plays are exactly like that – historical dramas with plots of nobles, feasts and poison. These are odd (in lieu of what I’d usually be reading; in terms of early 19th century play thematics they were probably not odd at all, maybe even crushingly standard) lyrical tragedies, more akin to awkward attempts at greek epics than the nuanced psychological drama of the later plays.
There’s some things Ibsen shed as he grew more refined. One striking element is a blatant Norwegian nationalism. In “Lady Inger,” he even tweaks historical events to stoke that anti-Denmark, pro-Norway sentiment. Norway comes out of the big battles stewing in the background of Lady Inger’s conflicted solitude as the noble, warrior force fighting the evil Danes and Swedes. It’s weirdly black and white. I think it’s sometimes alright to use less nuanced framing in campaigning for independence, and maybe that was his goal here. What’s even weirder, though, is that it just makes things up to play up the nationalism. It would have been alright if it was a wholly fabricated conflict, or perhaps if the setting was more fictionalized, but here Ibsen takes a real historical timeline (the Scandinavian Kalmar Union and the last attempts to maintain Norwegian independence within it) and changes its sequencing and choreography. A bit of alternate history that isn’t telegraphed or contextualized; in other words, historical revisionism.
It’s actually “Love’s Comedy”, again, that marks his first public reexamination of the straight nationalism of his early work. In edits to the text, he changed some words that were explicitly Norwegian to make the work more accessible to a Danish audience. This sparked a lot of hate from the more hardcore Norwegian nationalists that believed in the sacred purity of an essential Norwegian language.
Another thing he let go was verse. This he stayed with for longer, though, and his last verse play ended up being Peer Gynt, which is also coincidentally a thematic examination of various kinds of Norwegian nationalism. A lot of his early plays are in verse, and some are in prose, with random stanzas thrown in for no apparent reason.
“Love’s comedy” is in verse, and so is “Peer Gynt”. Verse seems to work for him in a few cases. Still, a more careful but unbounded approach to form is partly what makes Ibsen’s later plays so fantastic.
It’s not like he completely pivoted, though. Some of the cool things he does in his later plays are in the earlier ones too. Most notably, his obsession with strong women. In “Lady Inger”, the eponymous Lady Inger is deeply isolated as a noblewoman, simultaneously ostracized and pulling all the weight in a markedly patriarchal society. That theme of the isolation and confinement of women under patriarchy would go on to be reinterpreted in some of his best plays – “A Doll’s House,” a real classic, and “Hedda Gabbler,” that just got a lesbian movie adaptation starring Tessa Thompson as Hedda Gabler herself.
So what makes the later plays so much better? Nuance, for one. Critically facing his own nationalism and examining it in his plays. Writing as public therapy. Rearrangement, for another. His obsessions with patriarchy, class conflict, activist identity, heavy-handed symbolism, muses – these were all there in the earlier plays, it’s just that through revision, reconfiguration, playing with order and weight, he found how to make what was on his mind as impactful as possible on the page.
Reading Henrik Ibsen’s early work was sort of inspirational. And not because the plays were so interesting and idea-sowing. It’s precisely because they’re kind of stilted and obvious, these first awkward fruits of an undeniable tree, that they give me a sort of license to just play around. To feel what I’m interested in and create a silly, needlessly grandiose story out of it.
Written by Yan Nesterenko, a dedicated Writing Committee member!
You can find Yan on Instagram: @n_strenkyn
The Chameleon Lab, Revealed!
WILDe has been buzzing with activity this season, but one project has been quietly taking shape away from the spotlight. The Chameleon Lab — WILDe's crew dedicated to building a play from a limited script — has been deep in its creative process, and until now, the wider WILDe community hasn't heard a word about what's been brewing. That changes today. We sat down with co-directors Gyula Szijjarto and Timothé Mathelin to pull back the curtain on their latest experimental creation.
Q: What attracted you to directing a piece where the play is still evolving during rehearsal?
Timothé: Funny story is I actually took part in the first edition of the Chameleon Lab two years ago, back in 2023. Gyula here and Sofiya Petrova were directing it back then. I absolutely loved the concept of developing theatre skills, creating a bond with the cast, and putting up something all together at the end. It really brings a different sense of achievement. I liked it so much that I'm co-directing it now haha. What's dear to me is that the concept we use in the Chameleon Lab is going back to the roots of WILDe. That's how things used to be in our first years and where we come from as an association. I find it fulfilling to be honouring that.
Gyula: It is the only way I have ever directed actually. In my first year in WILDe I was about to direct one of the main productions where I already implemented this approach, if only Covid-19 wouldn't have cut the year in half... When I was on the board I kept experimenting with such projects, until finally 2-3 years ago I came up with the concept of the Chameleon Lab and together with Sofiya implemented its first version. Why I'm so keen on this approach? It is how I learned theater and acting as a form of self-expression and performing arts. The goal of amateur theater in my eyes is to realize something about ourselves and/or the world together in a group, actors directors alike, and form this message which is truly ours into a performance of any kind. The director is an enabler, coach, guide in this process to form a common vision instead of implementing their own.
Q: How do you balance giving actors freedom to shape the script while still guiding the overall vision of the Chameleon Lab?
Timothé: What we did is we first organised a film screening and all watched it together. Then, Gyula and I divided it into different scenes and shared the plan with the cast. Now that they know the plot and the characters, we're letting them come up with how the scenes unfold and how they want to portray the characters. We're here to guide them in their process of building the scenes and bring more detail, but everyone knows the overall plan, and the ideas we've seen so far are already wonderful!
Gyula: We — Timothé and me — come up with the overarching structure/timeline of the play. Run this by the actors. Then once the context is clear, the actors actually provide all of the initial input. Once they brought us their first take/edition of a scene, we respect that input and collaboratively try to bring out the most of it.
Q: How are changes to the Chameleon Lab currently being captured and decided during rehearsals?
Timothé: Regarding changes compared to the original source material, Gyula and I first discussed what our vision was for the overall narrative so we both had a common agreement, and then we shared it with the cast. We also really value their opinion so we had a long talk about the overall vision and now we're all in sync! For smaller details, we just discuss it with them as they're building the scenes.
Gyula: I think we have a common understanding usually of what needs to be done. Then an actor comes, out of nowhere, with something brilliant and/or impressive, and it just becomes part of the play.
Q: What kind of rehearsal environment are you creating so actors feel comfortable taking creative risks?
Timothé: First of all, getting to know each other. It's much harder to let go with strangers in the room. That's why we start out with a lot of fun theatre games, and gradually build into exercises and useful practice. It's also important to foster a positive atmosphere, and we do that by being encouraging and supportive. It's difficult to completely let go as an actor, and I'm so proud to see the cast manage it every time.
Gyula: We find it very important that everyone knows each other, is treated with equal attention, and feels heard because they are listened to. In the first part of the project, before we even start talking about a play, we provide trainings on different disciplines of theater so that everyone gets roughly on the same page. We play plenty of theater games where actors can collaborate, experiment, go crazy... And we also never start a rehearsal before having heard from everyone in some detail what is going on with them personally.
Q: At this stage of the process, what has surprised you most about how the play is developing with the actors?
Timothé: Honestly, how easy going it is. As I said earlier, there's a wonderful chemistry, and that makes the process so pleasant and easy. Everybody is onboard and always excited to come to rehearsals. As a director, that's one of the most rewarding sentiments.
Gyula: It has been a very rewarding experience to direct the Chameleon Lab every year because so many talented people who never acted before were able to surprise an entire audience by the end with some unexpected virtuoso performances. This is just as true this year as it was before. I think my jaw drops at least once at every rehearsal when yet another actor surprises us with their interpretation of a casual exercise. We're already so proud of them, I cannot wait to see the end product!
One thing is clear: whatever is taking shape in those rehearsal rooms is something special. A cast of performers growing bolder with every session, two directors who believe in the magic of collective creation, and a play that is still writing itself — the Chameleon Lab's latest production is shaping up to be one not to miss. Stay tuned.
Written by Anna Galtsova, a Writing Committee member and a legendary veteran of WILDe!
You can find Anna on Instagram: @gal.tsova