Matilda’s Tim Minchin: ‘We don’t want a generation of shamed men’

"Meme-based knowledge!" exclaims an exasperated Tim Minchin, railing against what he feels is wrong with the world today. The shaggy-haired Aussie is in London to discuss the 15th anniversary of the musical Matilda , for which he wrote all the songs. What he wishes that kids would learn from the story (originally published by Roald Dahl in 1988 and adapted into a musical in 2010 by Minchin and Dennis Kelly ) is that it's a celebration of "serious reading". Unlike, he adds, Danny DeVito's 1996 "travesty" of a film adaptation which "makes it all about the psychic powers which are really only an overflow of her smartness and her bravery".

" Matilda is somebody who hangs out in the library, takes her lessons from history and creates a bulwark around her moral instincts by learning ," Minchin says. "The way Matilda educates herself to power is a good lesson in this era where people read three memes on a subject and suddenly think they're a warrior for some cause they know nothing about…"

He exhales as he invites me to consider "these keffiyeh-wearing marching kids", alluding to the type of scarf some pro-Palestine supporters wear. He holds his palms up as if to meet a rebuttal. "I understand the impulse and even the ethical need. But they have a meme-based understanding of that conflict. There's no deep knowledge of the history…"

Minchin winces at how quickly he's lurched into referencing the war in Gaza. "I shouldn't do this!" he shudders as he settles into another interview like a frog into a pan of tepid water. The 49-year-old comedian, composer, actor and writer – who jokes that he prefers to be billed as a "Renaissancey man" – is regularly frustrated at the ways in which his carefully nuanced and elegantly expressed opinions get "reduced to clickbait headlines".

I've interviewed him before and it's a joy to engage with a celebrity who relishes the opportunity to chew through big issues of the day, though he's increasingly aware of how vulnerable this makes him. But Minchin can't keep away from the press because, as he sighs while taking my hand warmly, " You are my people !"

It's true. Although the invigorating hour we spend together is regularly punctuated with pleas like "don't make this the headline" and "don't cut me down to one line on this", journalists are the exactly the type of people who love kicking the tyres of facts, ideas and language with Minchin as he's done throughout his career: first in his clever, career-making comic songs, in his musicals (he wrote Groundhog Day as well as Matilda ) and in his Sky TV comedy drama Upright , about an Australian road trip.

While clips of the sarcastic-iconoclastic, piano-virtuosic persona he once assumed on stage might make casual viewers think he's a purely cerebral creature, in person Minchin, the son of a surgeon, wears all his emotions on his emo-kid black sleeves. His eyes fill with tears as he talks about his family. He clenches his jaw when he gets angry. You'll know this if you've heard his Christmas Song, White Wine in the Sun , on which he rolls his eyes at both Christianity and the faith's consumerism, before surrendering himself over entirely to the sentimentality of the season. It makes me cry every year.

What makes him cry? "Lots of things!" he says. "I'm pro-anthropic, so…" He proves his point later on, tearing up as he describes the swell of emotion he experiences watching "somebody who has clearly just started running out jogging." As a man who runs 50k a week, he says: "It takes all my strength not to shout out: 'You Go Girl!' at somebody who will clearly never be a gazelle but is putting their best, most moving human effort into it."

Ordering a flat white in Soho today, he's game for any questions. So I leap right in and ask what he makes of those who would cancel Dahl for his anti-Semitism? "I feel, pretty strongly, that there's no reason I should have an opinion on Roald Dahl's opinions on anything," he rallies right back.

He says he is going to see Giant , the play about the author, that night. But that he did not read the original book of Matilda back when the RSC commissioned him to write the songs. He worked entirely from Dennis Kelly's script, which he loved. "I'm not side-stepping your question," he stresses. "I just don't think it's anything to do with me. I read Dennis's script and I wanted to make it sing."

He's got stronger views on the 2023 changes to Dahl's original books designed to make them more "inclusive" for modern audiences. So Augustus Gloop in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is now "enormous" not fat and the "Cloud-Men" of James and the Giant Peach are now the "Cloud-People."

"There is a slippery slope problem with changing historic texts," says Minchin. "It's Orwellian. Historic revisionism. Banning books and changing books – even if the intention is good – is a problem. Do we want to live in a world where that is how we tackle history? To pretend something else happened? I mean, what is Huckleberry Finn without the N-word? That is the point, that it's painful. Do we change what happened in World Wars One and Two so we don't have to read about my great-grandad being shot in the head and lying in the mud?"

I agree with him. Although I admit struggling a little when I read one of Enid Blyton's Famous Five books (found in a holiday cottage) aloud to my children a few years ago. My daughter was irritated by the gendered roles of the characters – especially Anne doing all the housework. But Minchin notes that "Yes, Anne wants to do the housework. But George [the series' other female character] is furious at the suggestion she would. It's a perfect story of how some female people grow up to really like staying at home, while others might want to have a dog and dress as a boy. And those are both good types of woman. I'm not sure that needs revising, does it?"

Censorship of many kinds trouble Minchin. "I grew up in a time when the whole point of liberalism was that taboos are to be dismantled and that every sacred cow is fair game," he explains. "I still believe that. Which is what puts me at odds with some progressives [sic] is that they think that language policing is the way forward. In the long run, I can't imagine that's right." He sighs. "As soon as you make laws against the posting of a Nazi symbol you're making laws that can stop the posting of a Black Lives Matter fist. Of any symbol the next government doesn't like…".

He's intensely aware that "the zero point of offence changes". When he started out, skewering Christianity, homoeopathy and romantic myths of "one true love" with polysyllabic songs inspired by the Gilbert & Sullivan shows his grandmother took him to see, he says there were "walk outs and complaints." He says: "People would ask: 'Why do you have to swear and be filthy? Tom Lehrer – a better satirist than you – didn't have to use that language.' But Tom Lehrer got banned from Australia because he was so subversive."

Although Matilda is a musical which applauds "naughty" children rebelling against cruel and ignorant adult authority, Minchin tells me he was brought up "very traditionally" in Perth. His own children (18-year-old Violet and 16-year-old Caspar with high-school sweetheart Sarah, whom he married in 2002) have been raised "to be very polite".

Because Violet – now studying philosophy at university – is a queer young woman on the autism spectrum, her dad says she has "every personal reason to be rabidly rightsy about certain things. But she isn't. She's brutal on her own ideas. Not to her cost, but to her happiness." He recalls a time, a few years ago, when Violet and a group of non-binary and trans friends were on the receiving end of homophobic slurs from a boy at school. He supported her pushing back to a certain extent, but warned her to "pull back quickly, because at what point are you the bullies? If that boy is from a poorly educated, homophobic and misogynistic household then at what point are you the privileged kids ragging on a spotty f---wit looking for attention?"

Minchin believes that "Girls growing up in this era have to not bully boys. My son, Caspar, is 16 – born just after I delivered the songs for Matilda. He has a lot of shame. We don't want a generation of shamed men. We've just come through centuries of shamed women and shamed men are more dangerous for women . For the sake of women, do not want a generation of men with no pride narrative…" He stops and snags on how this might look in print. "I don't want that to be the headline but I don't mind it as a sentence."

Then we're off on another digression: swinging pendulums. "When it comes to cultural trends and education, the question is always: how far do we let the pendulum swing?" he says. "The answer should always be: as little as possible . Because pendulums always swing back ." He shakes his back-combed hair. "It's amazing how many people use that metaphor without thinking it through!"

Although he's warm and jovial today, Minchin admits he had a recent "relapse into fury" over the 2017 cancellation of the animated musical film Larrikins he'd written (and was slated to direct) for DreamWorks. "That was going to be so good, that movie" he says. But the project became collateral damage in Universal Pictures' 2016 acquisition of the studio. It was an experience that led him to diss Hollywood as "some really ugly letters on a pretty ugly hill" in his 2020 song Leaving LA . But he tells me he's just written a "big song" for Warner Bros' new The Cat in the Hat Movie . He's about to start work on three new top-secret musicals.

And as Matilda heads out on tour around the UK and Ireland (which he laments "it will still cost a family around £150 for tickets, but at least they don't have to pay for trains and hotels in London"), he is still annoyed that Groundhog Day the musical didn't run longer in the West End. "It was one of the most acclaimed British musicals of the last decade," he says [it won the Olivier Awards for Best New Musical and Best Actor in a Musical for Andy Karl in 2017]. He's frustrated that "there is room in London for every jukebox musical you can shake a stick at, but none for a proper musical with original songs…"

Back in Sydney (where he now lives) he worries that "the straight male voice has been excoriated from the theatre. There hasn't been one for a decade. We have been terrible in the past at including everyone," he says. "But now, for women, for everyone, let's not stop telling the story of what it is to be any type of human."

The RSC's Matilda The Musical continues in London and is now on tour. For details visit: matildathemusical.com

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