FAWLTY TOWERS (THEATRE) – 3 stars out of 5
If under pressure and asked to list a selection of the Top Ten all-time greatest British sit-coms I should imagine that – in no order of excellence – I’d probably be scouting in the territory containing the likes of Steptoe And Son, Porridge, Only Fools And Horses, Till Death Us Do Part, Father Ted, ‘Allo ‘Allo, One Foot in The Grave, Men Behaving Badly, Yes Minister, Blackadder, Rising Damp and/or The Thin Blue Line.
That said, when push comes to shove, my favourite of all was/is Fawlty Towers.
It was written by John Cleese and Connie Booth – of which the just twelve episodes, in two series of six, were first broadcast in 1975 and 1979.
Incarcerated at boarding school in the Berkshire countryside as I was at the time, the advent of the absurdist sketch show Monty Python’s Flying Circus on BBC 2 in 1969 had been a complete game-changer for this TV viewer.
Cleese and Booth, two of its alumni, later took elements of Python’s attitudes and combination of repartee and sight gags to another place – this being Fawlty Towers, a small hotel in Torquay in Devon, of which Cleese, as the harassed but fiery Basil Fawlty, was owner/manager – and indeed another level.
It thence passed into legend and part of British culture as a non-human form of ‘National Treasure’.
Yesterday, accompanied by my wife, I travelled from the south coast to attend the matinee performance of the theatre version of Fawlty Towers that is currently playing at the Apollo Theatre in the West End of London.
We had originally bought tickets to go to it on the Memsahib’s birthday in September – her choice – but due to circumstances beyond our control had to abandon that plan and so switched our tickets to yesterday – which happened to have been my 73rd birthday – thus making it (for us) a “double birthday celebration”.
I had never previously sat in the second row of the stalls of a West End theatre, but it seemed a perfect place to from which to behold any on-stage offering.
As for the play, recently created by John Cleese himself essentially from a mash-up of three famous Fawlty Towers episodes – that featuring an imperious, hard-of-hearing, large elderly matron fond of complaining; that with the annoying little man for whom no plate of food was ever what he had ordered; and that when, for the first time ever, time Basil actually won some money betting on a horse – and it certainly served its purpose, which was to tee the audience up for a succession of classic Fawlty Towers set-pieces and gags.
Furthermore, it would be churlish of me to find fault with the ensemble cast – not least Adam Johnson-Smith (Basil), who was outstanding, Anna-Jane Casey (Sybil), Hemi Yeroham (Manuel) and Victoria Fox (Polly).
However, by the end of the performance – which incorporated a 20-minute interval and just a 40 minute increasingly frenetic gag-filled second act – although this had been an undoubtedly worthy outing to the metropolis and indeed to the West End, somehow I was still left with a slightly “underwhelmed” feeling.
Analysing the issue on the homeward-bound train afterwards, it occurred to us that perhaps our expectations had been too high. This theory was supported by the fact that, as any actor concerned prepared to – and then did – deliver any of the many classic lines, the audience reaction seemed to begin with a perceptible roar of recognition before the laughter followed.
I guess the lesson to learn might be that – when push comes to shove – you cannot beat perfection. Maybe Cleese and Booth had got it right with the original two TV series – the concern being that any more than that would inevitably have led to a dip in standard.
As someone once said (or should have) – it’s better to go out on a high and leaving your audience wanting more!