Tim Minchin returns to our major arts festivals this summer with his new show “An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and his piano” – an informal performance combining banter and songs from various parts of his career. Here’s Minchin pondering the various swerves in his music, comedy, stage and screen career in an earlier Listener interview.
The Zoom camera reveals Tim Minchin working from home at 7.30am his time. With a beanie restraining his hair, he’s in his home studio, where a guitar and digital piano are visible in the background but not much else. All those awards he won for musicals Matilda and Groundhog Day and his many other achievements as a multi-hyphenate entertainer are elsewhere.
He says there’s a nine-foot grand piano in the front room of his house in the Sydney seaside suburb of Coogee, where he and his family have lived since returning to Australia in 2017 after stints in London and Los Angeles. But he doesn’t play the grand much during the day as it tends to echo through the whole place. In his workroom, he can put his headphones on and get on with it.
“My wife said, ‘You’ve been doing this for a while; you should have a proper studio space. You’ve earned it.’ And I’m like, ‘That’s very nice of you to say so’, and then I realised what she meant was, ‘I can’t f---ing bear your noise, so get a f---ing studio.’”
Minchin is back on the road next month with a run of shows on both sides of the Tasman before heading to Britain in October. But right now, he’s mostly focused on a qwerty keyboard, writing an episode for the second series of his acclaimed 2020 Australian television drama series Upright.
In the first season, he starred as Laclan “Lucky” Flynn, a bloke attempting to drive his family piano from Sydney home to his dying mum’s place in Perth and who, after their vehicles collide somewhere on the Nullarbor, gets a travel companion in the form of a young teenage girl named Meg, played by Milly Alcock.
Yes, taking a piano on a cross-continental road-trip didn’t exactly separate Minchin’s stage persona from the screen role, but he still made Lucky a memorably flawed and flaky character who becomes a surrogate dad to the headstrong Meg. It had an emotional finale that was also a natural ending to its characters’ journey. All of which might make you wonder: why a second season?
“My intention was not to, and then someone says, ‘Do you want to do another series?’ And you go, ‘Well, not really, but why don’t we get some writers in a room and do a hypothetical “what would the story be?”’ And then you sit down and halfway through the first day, you go, ‘Oh shit, yeah. There’s all that to be done.’
“The other reason I decided to do it is because when you’re me – 45 years old, unconventional looking – you don’t get these characters unless you make them your damn self. Lucky is great for me, because he suits me as an actor, and he’s thoughtful and insightful, but he also likes getting into fights. He’s selfish, but selfless and a bit self-loathing. He’s just complex and multilayered. I desperately want to play those roles, but even now, when I’ve got plenty of profile, they don’t come swimming across my desk.”
Between Upright’s Meg and Matilda, it seems girl characters are something of a lucky charm for Minchin. That’s just a coincidence, he replies, and he didn’t create either character. But he sees a connection in other ways.
“I really like the power of a powerful kid and specifically a powerful female kid. Maybe it’s a bit because of the era we’re in, but it’s been ever thus – George [a tomboy] was my favourite character from The Famous Five, and I liked Anne of Green Gables. Hermione, in a way, is the most powerful of the Harry Potter world, because she does it all in her brain.
“There’s something about where we are in history where if you want to put a lot of power into a character’s hands and have an audience fight for them, having them young is one way and having them a girl is another. But it’s just a coincidence. I loved writing Matilda and what it is like to be a six-year-old with a bigger brain than everyone else in the room, and I loved writing Meg, who’s a superhero, too.
“I love writing from a female point of view and you can imagine how amusing I find any suggestion that I shouldn’t do so.”
This year marked 10 years since Minchin’s Matilda the Musical, which was inspired by the Roald Dahl story, first opened in Britain, and various productions of it are slowly returning to stages around the world.
Also resuming in Britain is the filming of a movie of the musical, with Emma Thompson as the villainous teacher, Miss Trunchbull, with Stephen Graham and Andrea Riseborough as Mr and Mrs Wormwood.
Minchin has written a new song for it, and although he’d like to be at the filming, cheering things along, he’s not really needed until it comes to adding the final touches to the music. Making the stage production translate successfully, he thinks, will be trying to keep the magic trick it delivered in the live setting – “watching this little miracle play a kid who is a miracle” – while giving the screen audience a proximity and intimacy with the characters that they don’t get from a theatre seat.
Minchin is back on stage himself soon. He’s headlining the Adelaide Cabaret Festival before doing the same at the Auckland event a few weeks later.
His shows, however, stopped being cabaret-sized quite a few years ago. He has filled the Albert Hall. His first show of 2021 was playing the songs off his late-2020 solo album, Apart Together, with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra to an outdoors audience of 5000 in hometown Perth.
But cabaret, specifically an early show he titled Die Cabaret, is where he started performing before the comedian job description began to fit better. Yes, he misses the old days.
“I love cabaret, although I can’t call myself a cabaret artist any more without sounding absurd. But I really miss small rooms and the power of that, because when you are storytelling, you can really pull the crowd in.”
There are some good stories in the songs on Apart Together, which, after many comedy specials and live recordings of his shows, marks the first solo studio album of his career. Some songs – If This Plane Goes Down, Leaving LA, I’ll Take Lonely Tonight – have appeared in Minchin’s shows. But it’s very much a sincere singer-songwriter affair – “my embittered middle-age crisis album”, he’s called it – rather than a comedy set. What brought that on?
“In my head, I’m going away from punchline comedy songs, because I feel as if I did that pretty well and I don’t need to keep doing that forever.” The album’s title track resonated with the lockdown times, says Minchin, as did Upright, which featured the track Carry You that is also on the album.
“Apart Together is really an album about away-ness and home and longing, and Upright is a show about away-ness and longing and self-forgiveness. I guess that’s because away-ness is something I have experienced – being away from loved ones and wondering if you’ve done the right thing by living somewhere else.
“It was a good year to put out a little bit of melancholy reflective stuff. So now my question is, ‘What’s a post-Covid, post-Trumpian artist like me look like?’ And I guess my answer is, ‘a little bit happier’.
“I’ve always had a very keen sense that what I put out into the world should balance polemic with optimism. Now, I feel as if I wanted to go a bit towards optimism, because what the world needs now is love, sweet love.”
An Unfunny Evening with Tim Minchin and his Piano: Aotearoa Festival of the Arts Wellington St James Theatre, Friday 8 March & Saturday 9 March; Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival Auckland Town Hall Wednesday 20 March, Thursday 21 March & Friday 22 March, 8.30pm. Christchurch Isaac Theatre Royal Sunday 24 March.
This story was originally published in The Listener, May 22 2021.
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