The annals of musical theatre bulge with shows critics have mauled. Only a few have recorded the savaging meted out to the Ben Elton-Queen collaboration We Will Rock You. Fewer still survived it.
"Prolefeed at its worst," snorted The Telegraph, London, after the show opened there in May 2002. "You will find nothing bohemian, and precious little that's rhapsodic, here," opined The Guardian. The Daily Mail said Elton "should be shot for this risible story".
"It was a collective assault from left to right ... The reviews became a news event," Elton says. "There was a lot of rather unedifying schadenfreude, like, 'ha-ha, they f---ed up!"
He can smile – albeit exasperatedly – about it now. Fourteen years later, We Will Rock You stands as one of the most successful shows to ever play London's West End. But it was tough at the time, he admits.
"It hurt. About 100 people were facing instant unemployment. We only just made it through those first weeks. Audiences were very small for a while until word of mouth began to build."
Elton and Queen make for strange bedfellows. When Elton was an up-and-coming comedian in the early 1980s, a champion of leftist causes at a time when England was racked with social tensions, Queen was synonymous with pomp, excess and bombast. Queen was The Establishment.
"I left home at 16 and I lived in a caravan and Bohemian Rhapsody was number one for the first nine or 10 weeks of that," Elton says.
"In terms of contribution to the sum of human happiness, Queen has definitely done its bit. The one thing nobody does better than Queen is create that idea of the rock concert as community. They bring people together. I think that's why they've become so associated with sports events and why are they so identified with huge crowds. There's nothing wrong with that."
Elton, who lives in Western Australia with his wife, Sophie Gare, and their three children teenage children, maintains a close involvement with We Will Rock You. He still tweaks jokes. He oversees auditions and has cast approval.
He moved permanently to Fremantle in 2009. He met Sophie, who is WA born and bred, in 1987 when she was the saxophonist in the Jam Tarts and they married in 1994. "The kids go to the same excellent public school my wife and sister-in-law went to 35 years ago," says Elton, who turns 57 on May 3. "I do most of my writing in Fremantle and have done for nearly 30 years. I actually set my first novel, Stark, in a fictitious version of the town.
"Being half Aussie was never something I planned or expected, I just happened to fall for an Aussie girl. But it's been a wonderful thing for me to be able to come to truly know a second country, and I do feel I know it."
Life in laid-back Freo is a little easier there for someone on the celebrity radar, Elton says. It's a lot easier to maintain a low profile than in Britain.
"People know I'm here and sometimes I get asked to front up as a celeb for causes and such like, but mainly people are pretty used to seeing me around. It's been a long time since I first came here chasing Sophie in 1987."
Once the kids have finished high school, Elton plans to spend more time in Britain, but the family focus will still be on Australia. "I know the kids would like to come over to the east so I think university in Sydney or Melbourne would be a very nice idea."
Choosing to live in Fremantle does require him to make some spectacularly long commutes, however. (He doesn't do Skype.) Elton has been racking up the frequent flyer points working on a new sitcom for the BBC, which screens in Britain this month. "It's been wonderful to get that opportunity again and I owe it to Shakespeare," Elton says.
Upstart Crow is a sitcom set in Elizabethan times, portraying William Shakespeare as a nerdy writer ("a fartsome baldy-boots", according to his wife) who is victimised by snobs. The series is one of the keystones of the BBC's Shakespeare Festival, the corporation's contribution to celebrations marking the 400th anniversary of the Bard's death.
"It's been an inspiring process. I have been able to have fun not only with our collective love of the Bard but also our collective frustrations," Elton says. "Let's face it, Shakespeare can be hard work."
By any measure, Elton's creative output has been remarkable, for its diversity as well as the sheer amount of it. His screenwriting includes the iconoclastic The Young Ones, and with Richard Curtis he created the Blackadder series, regularly listed among the best comedies written for TV. He is also a playwright, a TV personality and a prolific novelist.
"I've just had my last novel [2014's Time and Time Again] published in the USA to very good reviews, which is new for me," Elton chuckles. "Good reviews aren't that common in my career. But it is a really excellent step for me. I'm also in development – quite advanced now – for a new movie to be made in Australia. That's my real dream. I would love to make a film here. What we do really well is small films that punch big – films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert and Muriel's Wedding, films with real content and a big heart, like The Castle.
"That's what I like to do, take something with a little bit of weight to it but make it entertaining. I'm not in the business of message-giving, but I do like to write about the stuff that interests me."
The Sydney revival of We Will Rock You, which stars Casey Donovan, Brian Mannix, Jaz Flowers, Erin Clare and Gareth Keegan, airs some changes to the show's original book, mandated by the changes in society, Elton says.
"It's a show about a world of digitised, computerised entertainment and that's all changed so fast over the past decade," he says. "There was no Facebook when I first wrote We Will Rock You and so with that coming along, and the show partly being about social isolation, I introduced a new plot level."
In the show's dystopian world, it's not only live music and electric guitars that are banned, Elton explains. Live friendship is illegal, too. "Making friends in real life is seen as a subversive act, the act of a revolutionary. So we put in the song You're My Best Friend. That's all new for Sydney."
We Will Rock You opens on May 5 at the Sydney Lyric theatre, Pyrmont; from $69.90.
Essential Elton
FICTION
Popcorn (1996)
Surfing a similar wave to Natural Born Killers, Popcorn is a viciously funny and at times brutal satire on Hollywood. Elton later adapted it into a stage play.
The First Casualty (2005)
Proof that Elton can write something other than satire. Set in World War One, The First Casualty is the story of a police inspector imprisoned in 1917 for refusing the draft and then pressed into investigating the murder of a celebrated gay poet on the Western Front.
TELEVISION
Filthy Rich and Catflap (1986)
Elton reunited Young Ones stars Adrian Edmondson, Nigel Planer and Rik Mayall for this series about the misadventures of a permanently "resting" actor, his sozzled minder and sleazy agent. Only six episodes were made before "creative issues" brought a halt to the project (below).
Blackadder Goes Forth (1989)
One of the funniest comedies about war ever made and famous for the poignancy of its final scene, one in which Blackadder finally goes "over the top" (below).
STAGE
We Will Rock You (2002)
Loathed by the critics, loved by Joe Punter, the broke box office records for London's Dominion Theatre, eventually closing in May 2014 with a final performance wrapped up with an encore featuring Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor.
Love Never Dies (2010)
Man-of-the-left Elton working with Tory posterboy Andrew Lloyd Webber? The cynics had a field day. But Love Never Dies, the Phantom of the Opera sequel, which Elton wrote with contributions from novelist Frederick Forsythe among others, still pleased many, if not all, of the Phan-boys.
Gasp! (2014)
Imagine a world in which the air we breathe has been privatised. Elton did in his 1990 comedy Gasping. This version, revised and tweaked for Australian audiences, saw the light in Perth and Brisbane in 2014.
FILM
Maybe Baby (2000)
Drawing on his own experience as an IVF parent, Elton wrote and directed this modestly successful story of a professional couple struggling to conceive their first child. Hugh Laurie and Joely Richardson star.
