If you ever face a quiz question about the most performed theatre writers in the world, likely to have a play on somewhere every day, William Shakespeare, Andrew Lloyd Webber andAgatha Christieare all reliable answers but a fourth may surprise you: Ken Ludwig. He also has intriguing connections with the other three.
The popularity that made the American wealthy enough to have donated £1m to the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is partly due – apart from his own much-revived comedies, Lend Me a Tenor (1986) and Moon Over Buffalo (1995) – to Christie. Ludwig’s 2017 adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express has had hundreds of productions and is currently touring the UK. We meet when he is in London for a workshop on a second Hercule Poirot adaptation, Death on the Nile, which premieres in September.
This lucrative sideline began a decade ago with a phone call from Mathew Prichard, Christie’s grandson: “It was out of the blue. He told me that, for the first time in many decades, they wanted to adapt one of the novels for the stage and I could have free choice. I chose Murder on the Orient Express because it was the most popular title and so I thought more people would go to see it.”
Did it worry him that the novel also has one of her most famous solutions? “That’s been interesting. Real Agatha Christie fans will know but I think 80-90 per cent of the audience doesn’t: they’re people who like mysteries or just want a good night at the theatre. When we did Murder on the Orient Express, it surprised me how surprised people were at how it turned out.”
That play involved putting a train on stage and now Death on the Nile requires a boat. Does he not like designers? He laughs: “I trust them! Sometimes, writing plays, I think ‘that’s going to be hard to stage’ but then I think: no, no, theatre artists love challenges. So now I think: just go and figure it out! They come up with solutions you could never have imagined.”
Murder on the Orient Express is just under 300 pages and Death on the Nile just over but Ludwig has a clear sense that both should yield two hours of stage time: “The books are not novellas but not epics. We went to [James Graham’s] Dear England last night and that’s two hours 50 minutes and worth every second. But, if you did that with a mystery that’s supposed to be moving along swiftly, that would be pretty hard to sustain.”
Given the complexity of Christie’s plotting, does he draw maps and time schemes? “I don’t do that. But, whether it’s the adaptations or my own plays, I take enormous numbers of notes on legal pads because they are longer than usual note pads.”
Turning to murder from comedy, Ludwig was struck by the structural similarities: “Maybe that’s why they are the two things I’ve done most of. In comedy and in cosy crime, all these things go up in the air, come down again, break but then eventually everything is ordered and calm again.”
Murder on the Orient Express has a 40-minute explanatory monologue for Poirot – meticulously delivered by Henry Goodman at Chichester in 2022. Such pressure on the audience’s attention, Ludwig admits, “is a risk. But it was born out of practicality … You have to be taken inside Poirot’s brain and how he ruled out all those possibilities before getting to the point of accusation.”
Goodman brought out on stage – as did Kenneth Branagh in his movie versions of the two books – that Poirot is ridiculous in some ways but also has a brain like Sherlock Holmes. “Right. And that’s the genius of the character. He seems like this fussy, pompous fellow who’s not going to cause you much trouble and then suddenly he’s got ya!”
Working on the books, Ludwig says he has never been sure why Christie made Poirot Belgian, so I try out my pet theory: had this punctilious genius been English, he would have been too close to Sherlock Holmes. “That makes sense. And he usually has a Watson-like sidekick as well: Colonel Hastings.”
The writer is unsure why the estate chose him. Despite German heritage – “it’s a more common name in the US than here, there’s a Ludwig drum kits company and an air conditioning one” – his appeal to Christie’s heirs is likely to have been anglophile tastes: he has written adaptations of Sherlock Holmes stories and plays based on Shakespeare. He is currently finishing Garrick’s Folly about the actor David Garrick’s staging of the Shakespearean Jubilee in Stratford in 1769.
“What I love most is the English tradition of classic comedy that extends from Shakespeare through Congreve and Goldsmith right through to Coward.” He also includes the Irish writers Wilde and Sheridan. “So I became an Anglophile and also studied at Cambridge University. Those comedies in English are my core. I’d go through those plays and take notes, trying to figure out how they worked beat by beat. How does Sheridan get to the amazing screen scene in The School for Scandal? I still have about a hundred of those breakdowns in my office.”
As shown by the seven-figure donation to Stratford-upon-Avon heritage, Shakespeare is his absolute favourite, especially the comedies. While in London, he was planning to see Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell in Much Ado About Nothing. I warn him that the subplot about comic constables has been cut.
“Well,” he shrugs. “Of the dozens and dozens of productions of Much Ado I’ve seen, I’ve never seen Dogberry and Verges funny. It should be a crack comedy duo but it’s hard to land. Remember the Ken Branagh movie way back? [1993] Boy, they were a disaster in that!”
Apart from his reading and education, Ludwig’s love of this country was also shaped by his career. He had a success in the West End before on Broadway, with Lend Me a Tenor, a farce in which, due to a misunderstanding, two identically dressed singers both believe that they are singing the lead in Verdi’s Otello. The play previously had a small American production under the title Opera Buffa.
“The [English] director David Gilmore liked the play,” Ludwig recalls, “and said he’d like to show it to a producer friend of his. And I got a little pompous and said I also had friends who were producers. And Gilmore said his friend was Andrew Lloyd Webber. So I said: ‘Sure, show it to him!’ Andrew loved it, but when I met him, he said he wanted to change the name because theatre audiences would never come to see a show with ‘opera’ in the title.” A lethally timed comic pause. “Only later did I discover that he was writing The Phantom of the Opera at the time.”
An alternative title for Ludwig’s play proved elusive until Richard Stilgoe, Lloyd Webber’s then lyricist, told him about an expression of the London impecunious: “Lend me a tenner.”
“Andrew loved it,” the playwright says, “and, once everyone had explained it to me, so did I.”
But the decision led to a curious culture clash: in the UK, people passing the theatre smile at the title; in the US, no one has any idea what it means. The comedy of two Otellos – both wearing the blackface make-up that was standard for white opera singers at the time – caused amusement but some actors, producers, critics and theatregoers also took offence and an alteration was made. “The minute I became aware that people were worried, I changed the opera within the play to Pagliacci and that’s the only version that should be done now.” Is it harder now to write comedy because of increased sensitivity about offence? “I have been conscious of that changing.” Four years ago, he rewrote Lend Me a Tenor as Lend Me a Soprano because of how male-centric the first play was: “I turned the three main drivers of the story into women. It’s roaring around the United States.”
Comedy writers at their desk divide between those who imagine the laughs and those who provide them. Which is Ludwig? “I have to confess that maybe once a day something will come up and I just laugh until I fall out of my chair. Unfortunately, no audience ever reacts in quite the same way.”
Death on the Nilestarts its UK tour in Salford on 26 September.Murder on the Orient Expressis touring until 3 May.