[align=center]
Tim Minchin is not just a man with funny hair
He triumphed with the RSC’s 'Matilda’ and is now touring Britain’s arenas. Comedian Tim Minchin talks to Mark Monahan.
Mark Monahan
17 Apr 2011[/align]
In 2005, the kohl-eyed, poodle-haired, ivory-tickling Tim Minchin came from nowhere to be crowned Best Newcomer at the Edinburgh Fringe, with a solo show of beguilingly witty songs, all belted out in the persona of a mildly Tourette’s-ish rock god.
Six years down the line, Minchin – a capable singer, dexterous pianist and supremely articulate lyricist – is fast becoming the supercool megastar he was once pretending to be. Last year, he appeared on Jonathan Ross’s chat show to perform Song For Wossy, a melodic proclamation of his desire to sleep with the presenter’s wife. He also wrote all the songs for the RSC’s garlanded adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Matilda. And his tour of Britain’s arenas with the 55-piece Heritage Orchestra, which resumes tonight in the Scottish capital, has drawn rave reviews and huge crowds.
How quickly things change. Before winning the Edinburgh gong, he was a jobbing musician and arranger; now he’s playing the Royal Albert Hall. Does he pinch himself sometimes? “I do,” he says, “though it’s hard to get those moments of clarity in your life. You have a child, change country, whatever, and I think we’re all very good at contextualising those experiences and making them normal again. Often, I just think: this is what I do. But then again, I came home from Australia a couple of days ago, to find an original hardback of Matilda there, with a message from Roald Dahl’s widow in it, saying, 'Thank you.’ I thought: this is insane!”
Matilda was one of the critical triumphs of last year. In his review of the production, The Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer commented that Minchin and dramatist Dennis Kelly “suddenly look like the brightest prospects for British musical theatre since Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice broke through”. Audiences agreed, and the show transfers to the West End this autumn.
“I really, really enjoyed the process of writing Matilda,” says Minchin, born and now based in Britain, but raised in Australia. “Even when I was hating it – even when whole songs were discarded – I knew I was enjoying it. I just feel I can go ahead in my career and challenge myself more now. I’m going to persevere with comedy, but I want to be writing things that outlive my comic persona.”
Matilda has, he says, led to plenty of interest from prospective collaborators, he has one or two possible (but, he says, “nickable”, and so currently undiscussable) ideas in the pipeline, and he is also considering writing an album of non-comic songs at the start of next year. But uppermost in his mind for now is the tour. “There are moments in this show that are Wagnerian in their epic stupidity,” he says, adding that playing with an orchestra of “serious musos” has helped him finally to start thinking of himself as a proper musician: “I feel legitimate now.”
So, for all his apparent self-assurance, Minchin – who cheerfully confesses, “My wife is under no illusion that I’m anything special” – has engaging chinks in his armour. His song Rock’n’Roll Nerd is a lament for every nice middle-class boy (such as him him) who might want to be cool. And besides, there has always been more than a dash of irony to Minchin’s entire stage persona.
But when he gets something, or indeed someone, in the crosshairs of his comedy, the results can be as unforgiving and uncomfortable as they are hilarious. The devout, the easily shocked, those averse to robust language – all should tread warily with Minchin, who could accurately be described as musical comedy’s very own militant rationalist.
Little riles him more than what he sees as lazy, dogmatic or wishful thinking, with political black-and-whiteism, inflexible eco-mindedness, and religion taking a particular hammering in his songs. “I don’t think you’ll find anything I’ve written in the past five years that just pans religion,” he says. “It only pans the place where religion intersects with prejudice.” This is illustrated by the time when he was collared by a fan called Sam. Sam claimed that his mother’s cataracts had been healed as a result of prayer, to which Minchin’s response was the lacerating ditty Thank You God for Fixing the Cataracts of Sam’s Mum. Now part of his show, the song attacks Sam’s apparent assumption that God hasn’t got bigger things to worry about.
“The song is incredibly brutal on prayer,” says the 35-year-old father of two, “and I’m willing to accept that that’s pretty mean, because what harm does prayer do anybody? My problem with prayer is that I find it extraordinarily arrogant. I’m open to the idea that prayer is incredibly important to people, and I wouldn’t want them to not have it. But I also think there’s room for someone to point out that when middle-class white people come to God to help their mum’s cataracts, they’re being --wits.”
Journalists have learnt to tread warily with Minchin too. One 2005 review stung so much that, three years later, he responded with a ferocious song. Yet Minchin is the first to acknowledge that this overreaction to a poor notice was conceived partly at his own expense. And his stronger material is often softened by his impish charm as a performer, the perkiness of his tunes, and his refusal to take himself too seriously on stage.
“It’s really just playing the rock star,” he says. “When I started doing it, it was particularly funny, because I’d be there with my hair, my shirt open, and there were barely a hundred people in the room. That’s ridiculous, because it’s so ostentatious – it’s such a clash between the act and the room. And then, as years go on, I’m now in arenas where that stuff belongs, and the joke still works.”
Ah, but can it really work as well as it once did? Now that he surely is a type of rock star, isn’t there a danger of his becoming exactly what he set out to mock, of the joke backfiring, the irony cracking?
“I guess it is a danger,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s manifested itself. I open this show with a massive song about how now I’m doing arenas I don’t have to try, how I’m just doing it for the money and the audience can -‑‑‑ off. And in saying that I’m basically setting myself the challenge to go absolutely the opposite way, to do everything I can to make the show amazing.”
