Creating Believable Characters: Miss Trunchbull

For the next video in our Creating Believable Characters series, Tim Minchin discusses how he wrote songs for Miss Trunchbull.

 

Tim Minchin:  Miss Trunchbull is a character who has a lot of thoughts about rules and about how to live life making sure you stick to the rules very strictly. So she sings a song about Hammer-throwing and about how in Hammer-throwing you have to stay inside the circle.

Miss Trunchbull (singing): “Life’s a ball, so learn to throw it, find the bally line and tow it and always keep your feet inside the line.”

Tim Minchin: It allows us to hear a bit about how she feels about the world in general. Then for the rest of the musical we’ll always know what Miss Trunchbull thinks about rules because we’ve heard her sing about it and we’ve got a lot more insight into her mentality, her thoughts about how the world should be and how children should act, how teachers should act.