Abridged from syndicated Interview with Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, by Richard Barber
Cluedo 2 stars Jason Durr and Helen Flanagan, and more information about its UK tour, with booking links, can be found on the show website.
Cluedo has been a stalwart of family life since the Hasbro board game – which celebrates its 75th anniversary in 2024 – was launched at the end of the 40s.
Then, in 1985, Clue, the movie, directed and written by Jonathan Lynn, was a big hit when it was released.
Fast forward to 2022 and a stage production of the film, based on Lynn’s original script, toured the UK. (There was also a game show, Cluedo, on British TV in the early 90s, inspired by the board game).
Now comes Cluedo 2–The Next Chapter. And it couldn’t be in better hands.
Acclaimed writers
With an original new story set in the Swinging Sixties, featuring all the notable game characters, Cluedo 2 is a riotous spoof, a comedy thriller penned by the BAFTA Award-winning TV writing duo, Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, whose numerous credits include Birds of a Feather and Goodnight Sweetheart.
This latest five-month UK theatre tour kicks off at Richmond Theatre on Feb 29, 2024 and visits more than 20 venues across the length and breadth of the country before finishing in Birmingham at the end ofJuly.
Like Cluedo 1, it’s directed by Mark Bell, director of the worldwide hit, The Play That Goes Wrong.
Why accept the offer of writing a brand-new murder mystery?
Laurence: “I think the producers felt that Maurice and I had a pretty good grip on the 60s which is when they wanted the play to be set somewhere in England.”
“We remembered,” says Maurice, “that rockstars were moving into big country houses in the late-60s so we dreamed up a rock ‘n’ roll superstar with a Mockney accent and then constructed a cast to include his wife, his agent, his interior decorator, his butler, his jack-of-all-trades and so on, all of them with colourful names. Someone is going to die and then so is someone else.”
“But whodunnit? The challenge was to make audiences laugh, make them keep guessing and make them occasionally gasp out loud while keeping it clean with no swearwords – something, in fact, for the whole family.”
The writing process
“We both sit at a keyboard, side by side,” says Laurence, “trading lines. By that stage,we pretty much know what we’re going to write. There have been endless arguments along the way but they’ve mostly been resolved by the time we start tapping away. Roughly speaking, we’re following a map we’ve already drawn.”
“If the cast takes you on a journey, you can be pretty sure you’ve got a hit show.That happened to us with one of our first sitcoms, Shine on Harvey Moon, and certainly with Birds of a Feather where the characters, as it were, were talking to us and by Page 8 we couldn’t keep up with what they were saying.”
Birds turned into Laurence and Maurice’s biggest hit, with over 120 episodes broadcast, first, on the BBC and then on ITV.
With Cluedo 2, they think the challenge has been different, more to do with the mechanics of making a murder mystery work than what individual characters say.
“If you’re writing a book like PD James or Jackie Collins,” says Maurice, “you’re not bound by the restrictions of a stage play. In the theatre, the physical constraints force you to be more creative and find interesting ways of solving problems.”
They learned their stagecraft from Alan Ayckbourn
“And no one knows more about the theatre than him,” says Laurence.“ I’ll never forget him saying that we knew how to make people laugh and how to create characters. All he could teach us, he said, was how to get the blighters on and off the stage.”
Laurence originally met Ayckbourn at the Hay Literary Festival in the early 90s where he complimented the duo on their sitcom, Goodnight Sweetheart.
In 2005, Laurence and Maurice finally wrote their first play, Playing God, about a dying rock star, which Ayckbourn staged at his Stephen Joseph theatre in Scarborough.
Accepting the challenge
“Although we were getting 17 million viewers watching Birds, we never saw any of them. But there’s nothing to beat the feeling of sitting in an audience of 700+ people and they’re all laughing. I think that’s why Cluedo 2 is going to be such a rewarding adventure,” says Laurence.
“We had the well-established Hasbro board game as a sort of blueprint,” says Maurice, “but, unlike PD James, we didn’t have a bunch of murders, 15 suspects, 203 red herrings and a policeman who writes poetry all firmly fixed in our heads.”
“And, of course, the play remains malleable beyond opening night. Sometimes, what works on the page simply doesn’t on the stage but you can’t always know that in advance.”
What of Cluedo 2?
“It’s a good, funny script with elements of farce”, says Maurice. “It also ticks the boxes in that lots of people die in lots of interesting ways. We’ve managed to find inventive uses for the weapons associated with the board game – the spanner, the lead piping, the candlestick.”
“We’ve been at pains not to regard this new departure as merely the continuation of an established brand, however successful that may have been on film and on stage. We’re hoping that this will be a standalone great night out in the theatre.”