ROALD Dahl's Matilda will soon be on stage in Manchester.

The multi award-winning musical, with music and lyrics by Tim Minchin, will be at the Palace Theatre from September 18 to November 24.

Matilda is about a bright girl who gets her own back on the self-centred and cold-hearted grown-ups in her life, including her parents and the dreadful headmistress Miss Trunchbull, before magical things start to happen.

Director Matthew Warchus said it was important to retain the darker edge of Dahl's beloved story.

He said: "He certainly has a very muscular view of life, largely because his own childhood was quite an ordeal.

"But I think children really relate to the extremities in his stories, because they tend to have extremes of emotion themselves.

"So it was very important to retain the darker elements of Matilda in our version.

"Of course you also want to comfort and reassure children, but if you don’t do it in a truthful way that’s not especially helpful."

Comedian and musician Tim Minchin added: "Writing musicals is hard, because it’s really easy for them to be cheesy nonsense. And with Dahl it felt especially important to avoid this. He was the king of my childhood, and he wrote with this holy trinity of humour, heart and darkness. The humour and the heart only work with the darkness to offset them; without it you’re not doing him justice. There’s a lot of stuff you can’t put cherries on, especially in Matilda. I passionately wanted to avoid a ‘Disneyfication’ of the story."

Visit atgtickets.com/shows/matilda/palace-theatre-manchester