Comedy masters Marks and Gran on Cluedo 2: ‘There’s no nudity, swearing or blood… but loads of murders’
Legendary comedy writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, the duo responsible for a number of much-loved UK TV series, have written a new play based on the Cluedo board game, titled Cluedo 2 – The Next Chapter.
If you were going to get anyone to write a sequel (of sorts) to Cluedo, a stage play based on one of the most iconic board games of all time, then who better than Marks and Gran, the BAFTA Award-winning comedy writing duo who have been responsible for some of Britain’s best-loved sitcoms, including Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and The New Statesman?
A five-month UK tour in 2024 marks the world premiere of Cluedo 2 – The Next Chapter, which kicked off at Richmond Theatre on 29 February and is visiting more than 20 venues across the UK, including Cambridge.
With an original new story set in the ’60s and featuring The Honourable Mrs Emerald Peacock, Colonel Eugene Mustard, ‘Professor’ Alex Plum, Miss Annabel Scarlett, ‘The Reverend’ Hal Green and the housekeeper Mrs White, the play is a riotous spoof of a comedy thriller.
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from “a little studio at the BBC” in London, Maurice Gran, who has known his writing partner since they were children growing up in North London, says of the play: “I’m glad to say we were asked to do it.
“Normally we have to have ideas and sell them, so it’s quite nice that someone says, ‘Do you fancy doing something?’
“As you probably know, there’s been a Cluedo movie and that gave birth to a Cluedo play, which has toured all round and done very well, so the producers wanted to do a new Cluedo play – not a sequel but another play celebrating the greatest board game, and they came to us because we remember the ’60s.
“We’re the only people who remember the ’60s and were there. So they wanted a show that takes place in the ’60s and that it was a good setting, and we came up with the idea of a sort of rock ‘n’ roll star who buys a stately home and gets bumped off therein. That was our basic idea and this is the culmination of it.”
Laurence notes that the pair, who were also responsible for the popular musical Dreamboats and Petticoats, were first approached to write Cluedo 2 in September 2022. “We started writing it in April of this year [2023],” he says, “and tomorrow [Wednesday, 18 October] we will hear it for the first time.”
Maurice interjects: “It’s very exciting; tomorrow we’re going to be in a room with the producer and the director and some actors, and then we’ll hear if what we think works, works.”
Laurence adds: “You don’t really know if anything’s going to work until you hear it.”
The cast hadn’t been announced when we spoke (the actors set to participate in the read-through are not necessarily the ones who will be in the final production), although Laurence wanted Tom Hanks to play Reverend Green – “his availability is a bit tricky,” says Maurice, “so we’re working on that” – and George Clooney to play Mrs Peacock – “we think it will be a departure for him,” suggests Maurice.
Maurice continues: “Whereas if you asked us to cast a TV show, we probably could make a fair old stab at it, but casting for the theatre is another art, so we’ll have to wait and see who we get. People who ticket-buyers want to see.”
Laurence observes: “The characters are very clear and defined so I don’t think it’s going to be a difficult show to cast because everyone seems to have the picture of the character in their heads, due to the game.
“I mean if I asked you to describe Miss Scarlett, you would probably do it very accurately.”
It was announced last month that one of the play’s cast members, Helen Flanagan, who was due to play Miss Scarlett, had quit the production due to health reasons. She has been replaced by former Coronation Street actress Ellie Leach, making her stage acting debut.
The play is being directed by Mark Bell, who also directed the original Cluedo play in the UK, as well as the worldwide phenomenon, The Play That Goes Wrong. Does that mean that Cluedo 2 will include a lot of physical comedy, such as parts of the set collapsing?
“I hope so!” replies Laurence. Maurice says: “Again, one of the reasons we’re so looking forward to this workshop is to see exactly what does fall down, to see the designs for the set… I know he’s got some great ideas – he’s a smashing bloke and he has got some very funny ideas for physical comedy.
“I’m not giving any secrets away when I say he doesn’t want the set to fall down, simply because it’s not The Play That Goes Wrong, but he doesn’t mind if the characters fall down a lot.
“The thing is to have real fun with the characters and with the story, but not to the extent that it stops being engaging as a whodunnit.”
Both writers are long-term admirers of the Cluedo board game. “It was my favourite game and what I filled my summer holidays with – books and Cluedo,” recalls Laurence, “so I grew very familiar with the game and was given a set for my birthday, I can’t remember which, and I was a huge fan.
“I think had we been asked to write a play based on a game we didn’t know, we might not have done it.”
Maurice says: “Monopoly I could have turned into a show but Totopoly I would have had problems with, or Risk… I’m not going to go through every game ever, I promise you, but this lends itself – it’s sort of Agatha Christie-ish, in as much as there’s lots of people in a country house and not many of them are going to walk out in one piece.”
The pair are fans of the murder mystery genre when it comes to theatre, but Laurence feels that television murder mysteries are “a bit too formulaic”, adding: “I think you pretty much know where you’re going; most of what’s on television is murder mysteries, or someone’s been killed and the detective investigates the murder.
“I think this is going to be as much a farce as it is a murder mystery, which makes it much more exciting for the audience.”
Maurice adds: “I agree with Laurence; I think interestingly the book is the sort of ideal form for a murder mystery and it translates very well to the theatre, as Agatha Christie has proved – and to film, to some extent, I mean Knives Out was a huge success.
“And again that owes a huge amount to the genre. It’s a classic genre, so what we have to do is to have fun with it but not break it, so to speak. At the end of it everything has to be credible.”
We moved on to discuss Birds of a Feather, the classic situation comedy starring Pauline Quirke and Linda Robson, which initially ran on the BBC from 1989 to 1998, and was then brought back by ITV for three more series – and three Christmas specials – from 2014 to 2020.
Watching one of the more recent episodes on That’s TV, I was surprised to see one of those “this comedy is of its time and some viewers may find it offensive” warnings, as it only came out a few years ago!
“The very first series of Birds of a Feather, which went out in ’89, was considered so controversial, the governors tried to pull it,” remembers Maurice, “because they were three women talking about sex before the watershed, and as you know no-one’s ever had sex before 9 o’clock in the evening, in a watershed especially…
“Well trigger warnings, the only show I think that deserves a trigger warning is Only Fools and Horses, and it should say, ‘There’s a character in this show called Trigger’ – that’s the only trigger warning I think we can justify.”
Laurence asks: “Do you think that audiences find murder offensive?” I replied that people seem to love murder mysteries. “It’s a funny thing, isn’t it?” says Maurice. “I mean when one writes comedy for television, you write for the time you’re in and you write from the place you’re at.
“I don’t honestly think we were ever offensive but I do think we were quite rude – I don’t think that’s the same thing.
“But as far as Cluedo is concerned, because it’s aimed at a family audience, the famous eight to 80 audience, there is no nudity, there is no swearing and there is no blood, and yet there are loads of murders! So go figure.”
Another Marks and Gran television favourite, Goodnight Sweetheart, the time travel sitcom starring Nicholas Lyndhurst, was revived in 2016 for a one-off special, 17 years after it had initially ended.
Although the episode was well-received, nothing else came of it and I wondered whether the writers had originally intended for it to lead to a new series.
“Well I can tell you that we’re going to bring it to the stage as a stage musical,” says Laurence, “so that will please Goodnight Sweetheart devotees all over the world – because they do come from all over the world.
“We hoped it would be a series, we had set it all up to be a series in 2016, but the BBC lost their nerve. They didn’t feel that their best shows should be revivals and they couldn’t find shows that matched the ones that were getting big viewing figures.”
Maurice’s take on it is: “I believe the BBC expected to bring it back, and it certainly got very good ratings and very good reviews, but in the end I think the BBC got some stick for doing revivals, as Laurence said, and so it became this mythic special. It was great to do it and it was lovely to get the whole team together again.”
I couldn’t finish without mentioning The New Statesman, the series that introduced sleazy Conservative MP Alan B’Stard, one of Rik Mayall’s most iconic portrayals, into the public consciousness.
I had heard previously that the studio audience used to laugh so much that the recording for the episodes often used to run over the allotted time.
“It always ran over when we were recording it,” confirms Laurence, “I think that the show that should have been kind of 20 minutes, I remember once being 38 minutes because of Rik making the audience laugh.
“In fact, Maurice and I used to sit in the audience and the warm-up man, or the producer, had to stop the show to let people get their breath back...”
Maurice, who says he loves Cambridge (“my son-in-law comes from Cambridge so I’m not just saying that”), recalls: “It was the only show that had to have a ‘warm-down man’ to sort of calm the audience…
“We had a great relationship with Rik, who was a comedy genius, but you had to say to him, ‘Listen, this little bit of business where you hit Piers is only supposed to last 30 seconds, and you’ve crammed it into five minutes of theatre and cruelty so the way things are going there’ll be no room for the story’.
“And Rik would say, ‘Well who cares about the story? They’ve just come to see me torturing Piers’, so it was a creative tension of the best kind because somehow we always managed to extract enough story that it made sense.”
Cluedo 2 – The Next Chapter will be on at the Cambridge Arts Theatre from Monday, 25 March, to Saturday, 30 March. Tickets, £25-£49, are available at cambridgeartstheatre.com and cluedostageplay.com.