Huge fun as classic Cluedo characters reassemble at Eastbourne’s Devonshire Park Theatre

Jack Bennett, who plays Wadsworth, is promising a huge amount of fun. Written by one of the UK’s most successful TV and stage writing duos, BAFTA Award winning writers Laurence Marks and Maurice Gran, (Birds of a Feather, Goodnight Sweetheart and Dreamboats and Petticoats), it picks up on the classic Cluedo characters. As the bodies pile up, The Honourable Mrs Emerald Peacock, Colonel Eugene Mustard, ‘Professor’ Alex Plum, Miss Annabel Scarlett, ‘The Reverend’ Hal Green and the housekeeper Mrs White move from room to room trying to escape the murderer and survive the night.

The show Cluedo – in hindsight now Cluedo 1 – hit the stage a couple years ago. “I was not in that production,” says Jack. “But I was aware of it and I saw it and I've got a long association with the director Mark Bell. I really, really enjoyed it and so when it came up that this was happening, I was keen to be part of it.

“Really for me it's the style of comedy that I love. I grew up on that style and really gravitated towards it. It's fast-paced. It is almost vaudevillian at times and it's fast word play and it's slapstick and there is a big element of the best of farce with lots of twists on jokes and wordplay and jokes that come back.

“I was chatting to another member of the cast the other day and I was remembering a seminal moment in theatre for me when I was 12 or 13 and I saw the Reduced Shakespeare Company. 20 years later I ended up being part of that and this is a show that certainly fits into that Venn diagram.

“I think what the Reduced Shakespeare Company gave me was the idea of a way that a story could be told. You are seeing an audience of mainly adults around you and they are all gleeful, and hopefully that's the experience that we are giving with Cluedo 2. Cluedo 2 does two things. It has the brilliant murder mystery element but it has also got that strong comedy element as well. You've got Mark as the director and he comes from the Mischief Theatre background and you've also got the writers Marks and Gran who go back so far, writing comedy for Frankie Howerd and then right through the 80s and 90s into the 2000s and you think of all the things that they've written. You don't win BAFTAS for not being able to do it. You've got all those elements coming together and you've got those iconic characters from the game. It is the Cluedo world and it's the 75th anniversary of the game this year.”

Not that Jack can claim to have ever won it: “I've got an eight-year-old daughter so I never win any games. The rules always seem to change at the crucial moment!

“But the audience will have an awareness and a familiarity with the characters and what the show has done brilliantly is that it has dropped these characters into another universe. People that saw the first Cluedo will have enjoyed it but you don't need to have seen that to see this one. It entirely stands alone.”