Visitors to the building formerly known as the Millennium Dome know a preposterously expensive, unnecessary folly when they see one. But who is to say that in these straitened times what the world really needs is not a £5 million stage version of Ben Hur, complete with live chariot race, massed gladiatorial combat, sea battle, heaving bazaar, crucifixion and, for good measure, an orgy.

Fifteen years in the making, Ben Hur Live will receive its world premiere next September at the O2, the concert venue that has finally made a success of what was a notorious landmark in Greenwich.

Where Led Zeppelin, Prince and the Rolling Stones have gone before, a cast of more than 400 people and 100 animals will now follow, including horses, camels, donkeys, chickens, falcons eagles and a pair of vultures who have a cameo near the end circling the Valley of the Lepers.

The show is based on the 1880 novel Ben Hur – A Tale of Christ, by Lew Wallace, the bestselling American novel until Gone with the Wind. It became a hit on Broadway and in the West End a century ago and then an acclaimed silent film.

Times Archive, 1959: Ben-Hur again turned into a film spectacle

The two syllables that make up the name Ben-Hur are enough to conjure up visions of all that is mammoth, colossal, expensive and spectacular in cinema

• Ben-Hur at Windsor Castle, 1927

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For most people, however, Ben Hur will always mean Charlton Heston and the 1959 Technicolor epic that still holds, with Titanicand The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, the record for most Oscars awarded to one film – 11. It was almost four hours long and at the time the most expensive film made.

More than 8,000 extras and 300 sets were required to tell the story of Judah Ben-Hur, a 1st-century Jewish prince whose action-packed life (born noble, victim of miscarriage of justice, galley slave, champion charioteer, miracle witness) coincides with Jesus’s time on earth.

Franz Abraham, the new show’s German producer, promises to create all the excitement of the film in half the time and with jokes.

Audiences attending the evening performances on September 15, 18 and 19, rather than the family matinees, will also see that the book’s rather prim orgy sequence (omitted from the 1959 film) has been fleshed out with considerable nudity and “above the belt erotic scenes. . . which show more explicitly what happens in an orgy”.

This decadent sequence will be interrupted by a fight between two groups of gladiators, “perhaps 70 of them versus 70”. The sea battle will feature at least three galleys.

Mr Abraham has a record of operating on this grandiose scale. His Carmina Burana, which has played to more than a million people in 13 years of worldwide touring and is coming to the O2 in January, features 250 performers, fireworks, giant puppets, bungee aerial sequences and “erotic scenes with naked girls”. To the surprise of many in the classical music world, the O2 has sold 12,000 tickets already and added a second date.

Staging Ben Hur has obsessed Mr Abraham for 15 years. His solution includes a hi-tech package of light, sound, water, wind and pyrotechnic effects put together by Chris Corbould, the special effects co-ordinator for the past ten Bond films, and Mark Fisher, who designed The Wall stage show for Pink Floyd, every Rolling Stones show since 1989 and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games. “The show will have the quality of Cirque du Soleil, the deep sensitivity of great opera, the speed of a good musical, the power of a rock concert and the visual opulence of a Hollywood blockbuster,” he said. It will be staged in the round with the climactic chariot race involving five teams of four horses hurtling round a 250m track at 35mph.

“There will also be fun,” Mr Abraham said. “I don’t like these old historic or religious topics being produced in a too serious way. You don’t want your audience depressed and in the movie of Ben Hur there’s only about a minute where you can laugh. We will have more.

“Children must be sat there with open mouths from the first to the last minute, the man in the street must feel that it was worth every cent and if the intellectuals and the journalists say. ‘Oh, it’s really not bad’, that will be OK for me.”

Perhaps only two men understand the challenge. Six Christmases ago Tom Morris and Carl Heap mounted a ten-man Ben Hur at Battersea Arts Centre. “We should have a Ben-Hur-off when it opens,” Morris, now an associate director at the National Theatre, said. “We could stage our version in the ticket booth on the way in.”

Tickets for the 15,000-capacity O2 show will cost £35-£125.

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