Cancelling Dahl would leave an unhappy ending, warns director

ROALD DAHL may have said terrible things but his stories are too valuable for him to be removed from the canon, the director of a new silver-screen adaption of Matilda has said.

Matthew Warchus, who also directed the successful West End musical based on Dahl’s novel, said that cancelling the author would mean losing his stories, “which we don’t want to do, do we?”

In an interview with this newspaper, Warchus described being severely bullied at school by fellow pupils and staff. He said Matilda, as a story of children defying cruel adults, was a powerful tale for both grown-ups and youngsters.

“It’s a very raw thing, childhood, and Dahl knew that it stays with us,” said Warchus. “As adults, we’re still looking for places where nobody can get us.”

Matilda, he said, was able to connect with “the accumulated scar tissue we all carry inside of us”.

While Dahl’s books sell in large numbers and his family sold the rights to his children’s works last year, reportedly for £370million, there has been controversy over some of his public remarks.

The author made several strongly anti-semitic comments to journalists in later life, including a 1983 interview in which he said “there is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity, maybe it’s a kind of lack of generosity towards non-jews. I mean Hitler, I mean there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere; even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”

Dahl also complained of supposed Jewish control of financial institutions and the media, and the influence of Israel on Western politics.

His family issued an apology on their website in 2020, 30 years after his death. It said: “The Dahl family and the Roald Dahl Story Company deeply apologise for the lasting and understandable hurt caused by Roald Dahl’s antisemitic statements.

“Those prejudiced remarks are incomprehensible to us and stand in marked contrast to the man we knew and to the values at the heart of Roald Dahl’s stories, which have positively impacted young people for generations.

“We hope that, just as he did at his best, at his absolute worst, Roald Dahl can help remind us of the lasting impact of words.” Warchus said that the family had done a good job with the apology and that it chimed with his own experience of the author’s works.

“I know what they mean about it feeling incomprehensible. When I paddle around in the world of his work, I don’t see any of that. So it’s very strange.”

He acknowledged that Dahl did say terrible things, but insisted it should not lead to his work being taken out of children’s lives.

“He did say those s----- things. He did think those s----- things. You can’t deny it. But what we do now has no impact on him either way, does it? He’s dead,” said Warchus, adding that if he was got rid of “we just end up losing his stories. Which we don’t want to do, do we?”