Alumni reunited
MATILDA
the musical extravaganza performed by a largely Banda cast pupils
For one night only, 19 Banda kids, from age nine to 15, performed this box-office hit with panache and pizzazz, thanks to the children’s passion for theatre and their directors’ enthusiasm for the story line. It is a bitter-sweet story about a little bright girl who’s unwanted by her narcissistic parents,
the Wormwoods (Isabelle Jones and Finn Hennessy-Barrett) and abused by her headmistress, Miss Trenchbull (Findlay Grammaticas) at school.
That would hardly seem to be the stuff that would ‘wow’ adult as well as youth audiences. But Banda’s deliciously wicked version of the musical was adapted for the Nairobi stage by the school’s drama teacher
Emma Withall who, with the musical’s director Karen Lewis, saw Matilda in London and loved it.
The adaptation was ingenious as Withall (whose ‘Beatnik’ drama club is flooded with kids) accommodated a larger cast than the original show. She had two girls playing Matilda (Vera Hoffman as