Alumnus and Anglophile Ken Ludwig on his love of theatre

Trinity alumnus Ken Ludwig will share insights from his 40-year career in theatre and film at an event on 12 May for College members.

Ken Ludwig has adapted his second Agatha Christie novel for the stage: Death on the Nile is touring the UK and Ireland, including the Cambridge Arts Theatre, 12-16 May, following the sell-out tour of Murder on the Orient Express in 2024-2025. 

The award-winning playwright has created 34 plays and musicals, including Lend Me a Tenor, which won two Tony Awards, and Crazy for You, which won the Tony and Olivier Awards for Best Musical. His plays and musicals have been produced in more than 30 countries and translated into 20-plus languages.

In a Q&A, Ken talks about his experience as a Cambridge student and what continues to attract him to the UK. 

To what extent did your student experience in Cambridge lead you to a career in the theatre?

It was very influential in two senses; the intellectual rigor of Cambridge, where I ultimately read English Literature as well as International Law, helped me understand the structure and meaning of plays and novels to a degree that I had never understood before. One of my dons had me read Wuthering Heights week after week until I could speak intelligently about it.

Second, being in England gave me opportunities to visit the Royal Shakespeare Company and the London theatre scene with a frequency that changed my life. Seeing Hamlet and Twelfth Night done to perfection at the RSC,  then going to London the following weekend and seeing Pygmalion, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Run for your Wife on the West End in 36 hours, changes a fellow.

How much time do you spend in the UK and what do you do here? 

I spend about three months per year in the UK. Of course I go to the theatre frequently, and I spend an equal amount of time absorbing other parts of English culture and recreation. I am a great Anglophile. I also spend a lot of time in Stratford-upon-Avon pursuing Shakespeare studies.

I recently had an opportunity to help save Hall’s Croft from critical deterioration. Hall’s Croft is one of the five buildings that are overseen by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT). It is the house Shakespeare gave to his daughter, Susanna, at the time of her marriage to Dr John Hall, in 1613.  I felt that the heritage of this country and its greatest writer could not be allowed to disappear, even in small pieces. We owe it to ourselves to do what we can to make a difference.

What are your current projects aside from Death on the Nile?

I recently finished a play entitled Garrick’s Folly, set during the Shakespeare Jubilee of 1769. It concerns David Garrick, the greatest actor of the eighteenth century, and his brother, George. Down deep, it is about my beloved brother and me and our lifetime friendship.

With that behind me, I am now in the middle of a production of new play entitled Pride and Prejudice Part II: Napoleon at Pemberley, which is set in 1813, when Napoleon is a prisoner of England for the first time. I am positing that during a week of that detainment, he is kept at a mansion in the north of England – Pemberley, where Elizabeth Bennet has recently joined Mr Darcy after the married. Pemberley, of course, is fictional and is mentioned in Pride and Prejudice but never visited. Finally, the play I’m working on at the moment is about Noel Coward.

How would you define your style of theatre?

What I personally admire most is what I like to call is The Great Tradition English Comedy. It stretches from Shakespeare’s high comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night, right through the early eighteenth century with George Farquhar in The Beaux’ Stratagem, then in the late eighteenth century to the comedies of Goldsmith, Sheridan, and O’Keefe. It continues through Pinero and Wilde in the late nineteenth century and into the Screwball film comedies of 1930s and 1940s. It is this tradition that I adore the most.