...and could Fawlty Towers be a West End musical?

John Cleese is turning Life of Brian into a stage play – and could be making a West End musical out of Fawlty Towers, too.

The 80-year-old confirmed that he was making a theatrical version of Monty Python’s acclaimed Biblical-era epic in an interview with Canadian newspaper the Winnipeg Free Press.

'Next year, I'm looking forward to writing the next volume of my autobiography, and then adapting Life of Brian into a stage show,’ he said,

However, in a subsequent interview with The Daily Beast Cleese explained that he would not be making it a musical, as Eric Idle did with Spamalot.

But separately, the comedian has hinted that Fawlty Towers could be following Only Fools And Horses in becoming a musical on London’s West End.

Disney composer Alan Menken has been linked to the project, but when rock journalist Mitch Lafon asked Cleese about it on his podcast, the Python said: 'I'd rather not talk about that at the moment because there's a lot of uncertainty about it.'

Cleese previously adapted Fawlty Towers into a stage show in Australia in 2016. But at the time he said that the sitcom would not work as a musical. 'It would slow it up too much. That kind of comedy has got to play to the frantic pace. If you stop for songs, it wouldn't work.’

Talk of a stage version of Life Of Brian first emerged in 2014, following the success of Spamalot, which was adapted from Monty Python and The Holy Grail and went on to take £136 million from its initial Broadway run alone.

'There have always been talks about trying to do a musical of Life of Brian,’ Terry Gilliam disclosed at the time. And earlier this year he explained: 'We made it 40 years ago, but it is so applicable to our world now… There’s fundamentalism, there’s anti-Semitism – we deal with that when Brian finds out his father’s a centurion – and then there’s Stan who wants to be a woman.

'Our headlines are about this stuff every day. The only difference now is people have lost a lot of their sense of humour that they had back when we made the film.’

Potential storylines for the play could come from lost scenes contained in recently uncovered papers from Michael Palin's archive in the British Library. They include a waiter at The Last Supper trying to seat Jesus and his disciples, telling them 'I can do you two tables for two and two threes', as well as Joseph struggling to explain the Virgin Birth to a group of friends.

And while Brian did not meet Jesus in the film, in the early version, in which he is the ‘13th Apostle’. Palin’s handwritten notes depict the title character as a religious figure in his own right, with references to ‘St Brian’, ’Brian Setting up the Catholic Church’ and ‘St Brian the only Martyr to die of old age’.

Cleese makes his playwriting debut next year when Bang Bang!, a farce he has written based on Georges Feydeau’s 1892 play Monsieur Chasse, tours the UK.

Meanwhile, the second volume of his memoirs will cover Python and Fawlty Towers and probably A Fish Called Wanda.

He told the Daily Beast: ‘I’ll be going into the sketches in much greater detail and doing analyses. Last time people said there wasn’t enough Monty Python—because there was hardly any—and probably this time people will say there’s too much about it. 

‘But that won’t matter, because they can skim. I’m explaining why I thought this sketch was superior to that sketch, and the fans will love it.’

Cleese's publicist told Chortle that they had 'nothing more to add at this stage' to his comments about the Life of Brian stage adaptation.

- by Jay Richardson

Published: 13 Nov 2019