IT’S highly improbable that Crunchem Hall would pass its Ofsted inspection. The school’s motto is “Children are maggots,” disciplinarian headmistress Miss Trunchbull picks up pupils by their pigtails and throws them into space and punishments meted out include being sent to chokey, a cupboard lined with sharp objects.

This sadistic vision of the adult world easily matches Roald Dahl's original text for Matilda. If anything, the crisp and biting lyrics of composer Tim Minchin and the script of Dennis Kelly send it into even darker territory.

Their gleeful anarchy make the Royal Shakespeare Company production an unlikely hit in an age of play-it-safe jukebox musicals. Since it opened in 2010, it’s won numerous awards and toured large swathes of the world. Part of its box-office success is down to its cross-generational appeal but its intelligence also means it reaches people who don't usually like musicals.

A celebration of brain over brawn, it has the five-year-old Matilda relying on her love of reading, and a bit of telekinesis, to escape from her loneliness and better her circumstances. The casual abuse from Miss Trunchbull and her parents — her ballroom-dancing obsessed mother labels her a lousy little worm and her used-car salesman father insists on calling her a boy — is played for laughs. But the hurt they create is real enough.

Rather than victimhood, though, the central message is of personal agency. “Nobody but me is going to change my story,” sings Matilda in Naughty and she does just that. First, she rewrites her own life through a tale she tells a friendly librarian and then she combines her cleverness with a little bit of naughtiness to instigate a pupil-led rebellion at school.

The child-focused viewpoint is underlined in Rob Howell’s set design, with its jumble of books and alphabet blocks, and it’s also there in the show’s frenetic energy, with the ensemble cast continually dancing or performing gym moves.

Special mention is warranted for Nicola Turner as Matilda — one of four actors playing the role on this tour — who avoids the usual stage-school precociousness and Elliot Harper as the fearsome Miss Trunchbull, whose height and thrusting bust give the appearance of a tank.

Trunchbull, and by extension the other bullying adults, nonetheless beat a hasty retreat by the end of the show, when the children mirthfully turn their words of abuse into a positive declaration: “We are revolting!”

Tours until August 17, details: uk.matildathemusical.com