As my chariot skidded to a halt in front of them I stood beaming in its prow, the proud race victor accepting the adulation of an imaginary Circus Maximus. Maier looked at me with pity. Lorries rumbled along behind him as he took another puff on his cigarette and wondered what to say. “You were very good,” he lied. “I was convinced that this must be the real Ben-Hur.”One can't help wondering if the same degree of effort is going into the orgy scene.
Actually Ben-Hur was hiding behind me. Nicki Pfeiffer has forearms as thick as lampposts and had just piloted my chariot blind from an unconventional crouched position close to my flapping tunic hem. No wonder he is playing the hero in the climactic sequence of Ben Hur Live.
The show has a sea battle, an orgy and music by Stewart Copeland, the drummer from the Police, but everyone involved knows that success hinges on one scene: what the posters call “The Legendary Chariot Race”.
Franz Abraham, the producer of Ben Hur Live, had dreamt of adapting Lew Wallace’s 1880 novel, Ben-Hur: A Tale of Christ, for 15 years but realised that it was feasible only when he came to this sleepy corner of the former East Germany and met Pfeiffer.
“I needed someone who could deliver a chariot race that even the Romans would have loved,” Abraham said. “So Nicki was the decision-maker for Ben-Hur. He told me that my vision of an intimate, high-pressure chariot race in a 70-metre by 35-metre arena was not a pure dream. This was the jump of quantum for this project. All other horse people and marketing people and promoters had told me all the time that it was impossible.”
Ben-Hur is the story of a Jewish prince who becomes a galley slave and then a champion charioteer in the early 1st century AD. It was a hit play 100 years ago — the chariot race was depicted with live horses running on a treadmill device — and then an acclaimed silent film. For most people, however, it is indelibly associated with Charlton Heston in the 3½-hour epic released in 1959.
The nine-minute chariot race in William Wyler’s film is a Hollywood landmark and casts a giant shadow over any attempt to remake Ben-Hur. Other live chariot races have been staged over the years but none has evoked the same sense of danger and excitement.
Background here.