He is the darling of the West End after turning a Roald Dahl classic into one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful musicals of recent times.
But Tim Minchin, writer of Matilda, says he is ready to go against the advice of theatre impresarios Lord Lloyd-Webber, Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Stephen Sondheim - by writing an original play.
They urged him to choose a classic story for a new show, but the 36-year-old says he is "desperate to do the opposite" after being flooded with offers on the back of Matilda, which won an Evening Standard Theatre Award in November. He said: "I want to go back into my studio and get on my piano, and just see what I feel like writing. My suspicion is I will feel like writing a musical I've been thinking about since I was 18.
"It's an original story, which is apparently what musicals can't be. Andrew Lloyd Webber, Stephen Sondheim and Cameron Mackintosh have all told me to my face I should concentrate on classic stories, and that makes me want to ignore them. Matilda's running and I've got my career in comedy, so I can handle a failure. It's a love story, quite dark: the lovers don't meet until quite late in the piece. It's about fate and destiny, quite a Greek-style drama with meddling, incompetent gods.
"Cameron, Andrew and Steve all acknowledged that when they look back at their successes they're all stories embedded in our culture."
