“How dare you?” Miss Trunchball rants…

How dare you? You are not fit to be at this school madam, you ought to be in prison, in the deepest, dankest prison. I shall have you wheeled out, strapped to a trolley with a muzzle over your mouth. I shall crush you, I shall pound you, I shall dissect you madam. I shall strap you to a table and perform experiments on you. I shall feed you to the termites, and then I shall smash the termites into tiny fragments, and then I shall grind the tiny fragments into dust, and I shall take that dust and feed it to the blood worms, and the blood worms I shall feed to birds, and the birds I shall release into the air, and shoot them down with my twelve-bore shotgun, and so-on, and so-on, ad infinitum, madam, ad infinitum.

Your father is a crook and so are you: last night I was driving home in that monstrosity he sold me and the engine fell out. What do you say to that? You can say nothing and there is nothing you can say because you are genetically predisposed to evil and you must be destroyed before you can be allowed to grow one centimetre taller than you currently are, do you hear?

Vomit, puke, snot-stain, are you listening?

All of these disgusting little slugs shall suffer the most appalling indignities because of you: yes you. I shall rip the rebellion out of this class and devour it whole.

I shall hang each and every one of you upside down by your ankles until all of your bodily liquids drain out through your noses and into jars, yes, jars, which I shall then send to your parents with your school reports upon which I shall write “could do better.”

Miss Honey has allowed her weakness and filth to permeate this miserable collection of excuses for children and you, madam, standing there before me like the squit of squits are its beating heart. You are the axis of evil. You are the nexus of necrosis. You are a rotting lump of pure wrong. You are the dark heart of all that is unholy in this land, a black hole of wrong-headedness from which no light, no strength, no discipline can escape. But I am a match for you, madam: in me, you have met the avenger, the spirit of all that is right and I tell you that there is nothing that I shall not do, no length to which I shall not go, no punishment I shall not inflict, no ear I shall not stretch, no fingers I shall not snap back to defeat you.

Yes! I defeat you in exhaltation! You hear? Are you listening? Are you listening madam?

Miss Trunchball, Matilda, by Roald Dahl, from the current musical adaptation by Tim Minchin and Dennis Kelly