Matilda has had quite a journey. The strong-willed schoolgirl first appeared in Roald Dahl’s 1988 novel, then made her big-screen debut eight years later, and eventually took to the stage in Stratford-upon-Avon in 2010, in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s smash-hit show Matilda The Musical.

The production has since delighted audiences around the world and is now on a tour of the UK and Ireland. What’s On spoke to Rob Howell, the show’s award-winning designer, to find out more…

Matilda The Musical has become a global phenomenon. First staged at the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) Courtyard Theatre 16 years ago, the production is now touring the UK and Ireland, stopping off at Birmingham Hippodrome this month.

Based on the book by Roald Dahl, Matilda tells the story of an extraordinary girl with a vivid imagination, who takes control of her own destiny...

Set & costume designer Rob Howell has been involved from the start, and has since received Olivier and Tony awards for the show’s design. He told What’s On that there was a long, gradual process of development before the inaugural performance.

During that time, as writer Dennis Kelly’s script crystalised, and composer & lyricist Tim Minchin’s songs were added into the mix, the creative team had to make a crucial decision - how would Matilda and her class-mates be brought to life on stage?

“As Tim started writing the music and the script developed, it became clear that Matilda needs to be able to hold the stage,” explains Rob. “Can you ask a young actor to walk out into the middle of a big stage, hold that stage on their own, and deliver the songs that Tim was writing? Or do you have to have a young adult?”

After a series of workshops to explore different possibilities - including using puppets - the production team finally settled on casting child actors in the central roles.

“It was an instant no-brainer - it was gold, straightaway,” says Rob. “I enjoy puppets on stage, but it just wasn’t going to be the same. It would have been a different style of production, which didn’t seem right to what Tim was writing and Dennis had written.”

Working on the production’s costume and set, Rob dreamed up his own designs, rather than replicating the book’s well-known Quentin Blake illustrations.

“Quentin Blake’s amazing, but I had to be clear at the outset: were they asking me to stand up his drawings, or was I going my own way? And it was, ‘No, you’re going your own way…’ That was liberating because it meant I could do my own thing. However, Quentin’s Quentin, and it’s inevitable that when you put a scruffy kid in a scruffy school uniform, it looks like a Quentin Blake scruffy drawing - but I wasn’t looking at his drawings for clues.”

However, an opportunity arose to have the illustrator’s work represented on stage - Quentin was invited to design a blazer badge for Matilda’s school, Crunchem Hall.

“The request went to Quentin and his studio. He sent a sketch back of a kid being banged over the head with a mallet. I put my lettering over the top of it for Crunchem Hall, and that’s embroidered and made by the thousands now - hand stitched on the blazers that all the kids wear, all over the world.”
With so many of the cast clothed in school uniforms, the show’s costume design presents some unexpected challenges.

“You’d have thought that school uniform would be quite easy to get your hands on, but it’s not, because different schools have different shapes, and they sell out at the obvious times of the year when everyone’s buying school uniforms. [Dahl] was writing in the 80s, but he seems to be writing [about] schools and teachers and buildings and desks in the period of time between the wars - an important place and time for Dahl that he kept going back to.”

Matilda was published in 1988, a time when school uniforms were more likely to feature tracksuit trousers and polo shirts. But Dahl conjured up a very different style in the book, which Rob has explored in his design.

“We’ve pushed it back to be a bit more austere - wool blazers, grey shorts and pleated skirts - because that seems to be the world that he was writing about. It’s hinting at a ‘yesteryear’ rather than ‘nowadays’. It’s fascinating - even today, when it’s playing in different places in the world, nobody’s ever said to me, ‘The uniform’s too old-fashioned.’ We all understand that language of slightly course, wool blazers.”

Towering over the schoolkids is the formidable Miss Trunchbull, Crunchem Hall’s cruel headmistress. Dahl paints a clear picture of the tank-like character in the book, and Rob found out more about her creation at the author’s estate.

“I try not to get too close to the original source material - I certainly don’t watch films, because I’m too easily distracted by somebody else’s ideas. [Miss Trunchbull] is the clearest description of any of the characters in the story… When I went to see Lucy Dahl and the estate, they told me that Roald based it on a friend of his, and they showed me a picture of this friend - it was quite an extraordinary look!

“When we got onto the idea that Miss Trunchbull might be played by male actors, that opens up the door for a level of exaggeration, which we needed anyway to get her to be frightening and powerful… It’s quite an early call for the actor playing Trunchbull to get into all of the underpinning and the makeup and the wig. It’s hot, and they have to do some agile stuff with it, so it needs to be very flexible. It’s a very cleverly made under-costume to give her the shape.”

Designing the set, Rob used a motif of children’s blocks covered in different letters of the alphabet, with the intention of creating a word-search game that is instinctively played by members of the audience, whether they’re aged nine or 90…

“It doesn’t matter how old you are, where you are, who you are - you’re instantly playing the same game as everybody else. That’s what I’m trying to do with the lettering on the set - when you look at the scenery, you might find a word the person next to you hasn’t found, or maybe the eight-year-old found it before you did. That’s more than just fun, that’s life - kids can be quicker than us… It just levels everybody out.”
The words hidden around the set also hint at events in the play - particularly a scene by writer Dennis Kelly in which Matilda invents a story for the school librarian.

“Matilda is telling the librarian her story on stage. She says, ‘An acrobat and an escapologist want to get married…’ The story goes on and it’s delightful, but almost all of the words that are in Matilda’s story are hidden in a wordsearch all over the set. You can find them if you look - you can find ‘hug’, you can find ‘marriage’. You can also find ‘burp’, by the way!

“The one thing that I never get bored of is when I go to see the show and I’m there at the beginning. The audiences are going in, and you see families - kids, parents, grandparents - they’ve got there 10 minutes early or whatever, and the number of arms pointing up at the set… They’re basically saying ‘What have you found? I found acrobat - wait, does it say burp? It can’t say burp!’ I never get tired of seeing that - that’s a proper family experience.”

Matilda The Musical shows at Birmingham Hippodrome from Wednesday 1 July to Sunday 2 August

By Jessica Clixby