Arts Interview: Writer Ben Elton talks about the 2016 Australian return of Queen Musical "We Will Rock You"

Back in August 2003, We Will Rock You first opened in Australia at Melbourne’s Regent Theatre. Written by Ben Elton (The Young Ones, Blackadder) and featuring no less than 24 songs from classic rock group Queen, the show was a huge success, with over 15 million theatregoers in 17 countries having since experienced the stage production. And now – from 30th April 2016 – the show is returning to Australia for a run of shows around the country. In advance of this, I sat down with writer Ben Elton to talk about the show’s legacy, the changes we can expect, his plans for a new TV show in the UK and more…

Mr Elton, welcome back to Sydney.

My pleasure.

It’s not as long a flight for you these days.

Well, it depends where I am. I’m going to go back to Britain from here, but I came over from WA, so it’s still a fucking long way when you’ve gotta come for a meeting… I’m coming for a few days to supervise the final auditions, as you know, Brian, Drew and myself are always very hands-on with productions of We Will Rock You, so I’ll be in Melbourne doing the last calls, and we’re doing a bit of media while I’m here.

May as well kill a few birds with one stone.

Exactly.

With the show this time around… I mean, we’re thirteen years into the process of the show…

Fifteen for me, yeah. It opened thirteen years ago.

So fifteen years into the process for you… What more is there to say about the show?

Well, it’s funny. I wrote, originally, a vision of a world where live music is becoming increasingly cold and sanitised, even banned, a world where people are locked into a digitised, corporatised, computerised form of entertainment – of course, you know, that ain’t going away! In fact, quite the opposite. The satire that I wrote fifteen years ago… there was no iPhone back then, no American Idol then, there was no Spotify, no streaming… I mean, we still were in the old media world when We Will Rock You was written, and yet it’s all about new media. And so it’s had to change quite a bit, with these new developments.

I’ll give you a good example of how I continue to work on We Will Rock You. Those who know it from those early days will recognise 90 percent of it, but that ten percent that’s changed is huge. I put a new song in only a year or two ago, in America, which they’ll see in Australia, which was never in the London production, and it’s a really good, little new addition. You may be aware the show’s a dystopian show, it’s set in the future, kids are isolated, they’re all online, live music is banned, electric guitars are banned, because nobody wants to upset the corporate marketing machine. And this idea of kids isolated by technology, which I wrote about fifteen years ago, well there was no social networking then. And so since then, Twitter and Facebook have turned up and, if I didn’t factor them in, this show would look like Metropolis or something. It would look like a dystopian vision, from then.

So, I’ve used “[You’re My] Best Friend”, which is a smash hit John Deacon/Queen song, which was never in the show in London in all its years, but I put it in because in the new bit of the story, Galileo and Scaramouche, my two rebels who meet having escaped “The Machine”, so to speak. This is a world where, not only live music and electric guitars are banned, but actual real-time friendship is banned, where you’re only allowed to have social network friendships. Real friendship is illegal and an act of subversion; you must have your friendships online. I don’t deal with how people fuck each other. I don’t even go there. But basically, in my story, real friendship is illegal. So when they meet and they form a real, physical, human friendship as opposed to a Facebook friendship, they are effectively best friends because neither of them have ever had a friend before. They are [their] only friends and they are best friends.

And so they sing “You’re My Best Friend” and it’s a beautiful new context, because actually what it means is “you’re my only friend because I live in a world where isolation is society”. So that’s a significant change, a whole new number, and a little bit of new plotting and character work all gone in, because the world has changed since We Will Rock You was written.

So you haven’t added any cyber sex is what I’m getting from you there.

[Laughs] Well, I guess so. If I was writing a novel I would say yeah, basically everybody’s living off porn, cyber sex, and they get inseminated by a man who comes around with a syringe, you know, whatever. Or the kids are all test tubes.

Some cross between The Matrix and Tinder.

The Matrix was a bit of an inspiration for this show. It’s another dystopian vision, and of course, it’s one where people are locked inside a computer. But in that vision, nobody ever really knows kind of why these evil things are doing these things. I think it’s almost to… eat the people? I think eventually the reason normally is, people are being kept in a kind of computer dream is so that they can be eaten. Which is, shall we say, a very old technology need.

We’re basically used as batteries, from memory.

Ah, batteries. Well that’s unlikely to happen. But in my idea, the machine would just want to create more consumers. Capitalism doesn’t want to kill people and put them to sleep, it just wants to make them consume more. Buy more. Download more. Look at more adverts. Basically the last thing they want is going out, making friends and going to gigs. You want them online, downloading, buying. And so sometimes the satire overtakes itself.

Like five years ago, I put a Twitter joke in. And it was an obvious Twitter joke, well it’s obvious now: Galileo and Scaramouse are escaping and there’s a big scene – “How did he find us?” – and it turns out they’ve had tracking devices implanted inside their heads. Well of course, these days, we know where our kids are! We just look and find our phone. The idea of tracking someone… just look on the fucking Google! So I put in a joke where he said, “Well, maybe he’s been following me on Twitter”, and she says, “You’ve been on Twitter whilst we’ve been escaping the evil man?” And he says, “Oh, you know, just the obvious stuff like what I had for breakfast, the really important stuff”. Now that’s the oldest, most boring Twitter observation. Everyone now knows “Oh, what did you do? Oh you had a great latte. Why don’t you Twitter it?” Five years ago, briefly, it was reasonable, you know, “I’ve gotta Twitter that I’ve just had a great latte. Let me take a photo of it”. Nobody does that anymore, because we all know it’s the naftest thing.

We had to take Britney Spears out as a figure of amusement when she had her breakdown because we’re not cruel people. Clearly, suddenly, this rather fun, beautiful popstar had turned into this causality, literally shaving her hair in public. That’s a serious breakdown. That woman has some issues. Thank goodness she’s worked through them, she seems more healthy now. But I took the whole Britney Spears references out of We Will Rock You because I’m not going to, you know, take the piss out of someone having serious issues, obviously. So, unlike any other musical which is set in stone the day it opens on Broadway or the West End and then is just reproduced from what they call a “bible”. We Will Rock You never stops, and it half kills us but we love it.

Have you been hands on involved in just about every major production?

All the major ones, yeah. I mean, some more than others. The three big changes since London were the Australian production, where I changed a number of things; back in 2003 I put ‘Now I’m Here’ in, which is a great Brian May rock ’n’ roll song for Killer Queen, and a number of other changes. Then really a lot of work in Germany. The foreign language productions I worked on through Germany and inventing a whole new level of comedy because, what do you do when all the songs are in English? Well I came up with a joke, a nice idea that… because this is a world where rock ‘n’ roll is banned, rock is scarcely remembered, you’ve got these bohemians who are trying to recreate what they see as like Ancient Greek art, and they’re trying to rediscover it from fragments.

And so with foreign language productions there’s an extra level of comedy, where actually, the English language is a dead language, like Greek. It’s the language of the classics, because, of course, English is the language of rock ‘n’ roll, there’s no point pretending it… there’s some good rock songs in other languages… but basically, English is the language of rock ‘n’ roll. And so it’s kind of a clever, nice new addition for We Will Rock You. Not only are electric guitars banned, but the dead language is banned. We want people to sing in English because that’s the language of rock ‘n’ roll. That means that wherever we are, whether we’re in our German language production, or – we’re just doing a South American production, a Spanish, or a Portuguese production, that language is the language of moderna. So we sing the Killer Queen songs in German or Spanish, but the bohemians and the rebels sing in English. It’s a nice new level and one that English language productions never know about.

So become bilingual and get the whole experience.

[Laughs] Yeah, exactly.

It would interesting to see something like this play in China. You could never see that happening, could you?

Well it played in Japan and it was a big hit. But I will never know whether my earnest efforts to create that subtle language gag translated across, I don’t know. They didn’t want to sing the songs in Japanese. I think, my memory is we only sang a couple – they wanted them in English. So obviously that negates the whole joke. The point was Killer Queen, she drinks Moet Chandon, she sings it in German or Spanish, the evil song of domination and power in the language of the power.

So it’s coming back to Sydney, and then we travel around the country?

Yeah, definitely. It’s a big tour, I mean, Christ, I couldn’t do it just for Sydney. We’re doing Melbourne and Brisbane and Adelaide and Perth, I think that’s about it. It’ll be a big year-long tour, and I’d like to think… I’ll do a bit more work on it again. There will be some Aussie references that will only work here. Funnily enough, ten, twelve years ago I put a couple of good Skyhooks jokes in, because, you know, I’m in my fifties, I love glam rock. That’s my period, that was when I was a teenager. And even then, it was fading, people didn’t really get it. You know, like Galileo is this character who imagines he’s a rockstar even though he’s just a punk kid. And so I’ve got my girl, Scaramouse, she’s always taking the piss out of him, and at one point in the old Aussie production I had him saying, “Hey, ego is not a dirty word!”. Now that’s a big Skyhooks hit. And then he says, “You just like me because I’m good in bed”, and half the bloody audience don’t even know and half do. So this time, my Aussie references have got to be updated considerably.

[Laughs] That’s one thing that I guess that limits you in terms of the stage production, because it really does have to be things that are general knowledge that people understand.

Yeah. There’s only two or three that I’ll make specific. Do a mention of Johnny Farnham. I did use “I’m the voice, try and understand it” and that worked quite well. People always remember that one. But basically yeah, it’s general knowledge – Beatles, Stones, you know, the references to old rock ‘n’ roll.

What else is coming up for you?

Got a new sitcom at the BBC, so that’s great news. I didn’t think they’d give me another one, the age I am. It’ll be my sixth sitcom with them, I’ve been very lucky. And three out of five have been hits, I wanna make it four out of six. So that’s good news for me. Had a new novel out. I’ve never had a sniff of success in America and that’s the way it goes. I’ve never gone over there and worked there, one of the reasons is because I’ve been working in Australia, because I married an Australian. I mean, I’ve had a little bit, Blackadder is known, some people know me over there – and We Will Rock You was quite successful over there… but basically…

Did it have a Las Vegas production?

It did, which ran a year. But because we had no Broadway power behind us, we tried to open in Vegas and it was okay, it wasn’t huge, but it was fun. I went over, directed it, it was fun. DeNiro came, it was great. Meatloaf was there at the premiere, we had a good laugh. But my new novel is being published in America and that’s the first time I’ve had a novel published in America since Popcorn, which is nearly twenty years ago. So, you know, all over the world except America. I mean, my novels and plays have played everywhere.

But you know, now they can get it on Kindle and stuff over there if there are some fans…

Well I mean, there are some fans. I get letters from America, just as I’m sure there are kids in Oz who are a fan of a Latvian novel. There’s a few. But if you want real success, you need a profile, so anyways. The new things for me are: the new novel’s being published in the States and a sitcom with the BBC.

Fantastic. Well, can’t wait to see what comes of that, and living the dream from the musical world… fifteen years ago, that was the dream, wasn’t it? To have a show that lives forever?

Yeah, well to have a show like We Will Rock You is a rare thing. To run 12 years in a 2,000-seat theatre in London, that was something we didn’t expect.

I’m sure you hoped for it.

Well, even we didn’t dream that big.

———-

We Will Rock You will tour Australia from April next year. Ticket details below:

SYDNEY

Venue:
Sydney Lyric Theatre, The Star

Season:
From 30 April 2016

Performance Times:
Tues 7pm, Wed–Sat 8pm, Sat matinee 2pm, Sunday 1pm & 6pm

Price:
From $69.90*

Bookings:
ticketmaster.com.au or 1300 795 267
Groups 8+ call 1300 889 278

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

BRISBANE

Venue:
Lyric Theatre, QPAC

Season:
From 3 July 2016

Performance Times:
Tues–Sat 7.30pm, Sat matinee 2pm, Sunday 1pm & 6pm

Price:
From $69.90*

Bookings:
qpac.com.au or phone 136 246
Groups 8+ 07 3840 7466

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

MELBOURNE

Venue:
Regent Theatre

Season:
From 30 August 2016

Performance Times:
Tues 7pm, Wed–Sat 8pm, Sat matinee 2pm, Sunday 1pm & 6pm

Price:
From $69.90*

Bookings:
ticketmaster.com.au or phone 1300 111 011
Groups 8+ call 1300 889 278

TICKETS ON SALE NOW

PERTH

Venue:
Crown Theatre, Burswood

Season:
From 16 November 2016

TICKETS ON SALE IN 2016 – WAITLIST NOW FOR PRIORITY BOOKINGS

ADELAIDE

Venue:
Festival Theatre, Adelaide Festival Centre

Season:
From 3 January 2017

TICKETS ON SALE IN 2016 – WAITLIST NOW FOR PRIORITY BOOKINGS

*An additional transaction fee and/or a credit/debit payment processing fee may apply

Interview by Larry Heath. Transcription by Jennifer Ma

Larry Heath

Founding Editor and Publisher of the AU review. Currently based in Toronto, Canada. You can follow him on Twitter @larry_heath or on Instagram @larryheath.