It would be hard to imagine a bigger supply of festive fun than that offered by the Royal Shakespeare Company in its musical version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda.

The show is by turns hilarious and deeply moving. It features superb performances from a company of young actors and a funny but frightening trio of grotesques among the characters played by adults — including the show-stealing portrait of the reptilian headmistress Agatha Trunchbull from Bertie Carvel. Dennis Kelly’s book is long on wit; so. too, are the songs by Tim Minchin, who also provides many toe-tapping tunes.

As someone who knows neither Dahl’s tale nor the popular film derived from it, I came to the show with no preconceptions. I found myself utterly charmed by the story of the little girl Matilda, who is able to outsmart a malevolent adult world purely on the basis of her intelligence (and just a trace of magic). She was played — wonderfully — on the night of the press performance by 11-year-old Kerry Ingram. Since all the children appearing that night had been chosen at random by drawing straws, it seems safe to assume that Adrianna Bertola and Josie Griffiths are every bit as good. Full marks to director Matthew Warchus and choreographer Peter Darling for guiding the youngsters (and the adults too!) so expertly.

Matilda’s chief virtue is that it manages, unpreachily, to be a celebration of literacy and of the values of reading, a fact reflected in the letter-bedecked cubes that dominate Rob Howell’s eye-grabbing designs. (Ranks of desks that rise out of the stage are another clever feature, supplying individual platforms for all the high jinks at unspeakable Crunchem Hall.) That books have to be good things is obvious not just from the fact that Matilda loves them, as do her kindly teacher Miss Honey (Lauren Ward) and the good-sort local librarian Mrs Phelps (Melanie La Barrie). As important, perhaps, is what can be inferred from the characters of enemies to to printed word. Chief among these are Matilda’s appalling parents, a greaseball of a car salesman dad (Paul Kaye) and the dumbest of dumb blonde (peroxide variety) mums (Josie Walker), with a mania for ballroom dancing and the prancing partner (Michael Rouse) who joins her in it.

Mein Kampf possibly apart, one suspects books have little importance in the life of Miss Trunchbull, a school head of such terrifying malevolence as almost to rival Wackford Squeers. That she remains a comic figure here, too, has everything to do with Carvel’s tour de force performance, especially in the hilarious gymnasium number, The Smell of Rebellion.

Courtyard Theatre, Stratford. Until January 30. 0844 800 1110 (www.rsc.org.uk).