What should we hope for when TV hits of yesteryear are revived onstage? Director Caroline Jay Ranger insists in the programme notes that her Fawlty Towers cast “not only provide the essence of the roles required [but also] offer something fresh and unique”. But do they? And is anyone actually here for fresh and unique? I’m not so sure. If the performances in this revamp of the Torquay hotel sitcom aren’t impersonations per se, they’re near as dammit. But they’re very good ones, and audiences who already love the material (most of them, let’s face it) will not be disappointed.
That’s no mean achievement. The danger in trying to recreate the original, as Ranger’s production (of an adaptation by John Cleese) does, is that the performances of Cleese, Prunella Scales, Andrew Sachs and co cannot, at least as far as fans are concerned, be bettered. So why not just watch the DVD? This revival makes the answer self-evident. Cleese and Connie Booth’s series had its roots in theatrical farce, so its frantic comings and goings, its slapstick and mounting chaos feel at home onstage. And the DVD wouldn’t afford you the pleasure, a very keen one, of seeing Adam Jackson-Smith in the Basil role, as astonishing an act of mimicry-cum-resurrection as you’re ever likely to encounter.
Heaven knows how it felt for Cleese to watch this Basil 2.0 come to life. Spooky, surely. The mannerisms, the clipped speech patterns, the boiling frustration – they’re all instantly, uncannily identifiable. Jackson-Smith even masters Cleese-alike physical humour, making a great comic virtue of his lanky body, prompting spontaneous applause when breaking out in a goose-step in front of his German hotel guests. Alongside him, Anna-Jane Casey is every inch the “tyrant queen” as Sybil, Victoria Fox the mid-Atlantic vocal double of Polly, and Hemi Yeroham mystified by it all as the put-upon busboy from Barcelona. Paul Nicholas, a sitcom doyen himself, is here too, a mite less confused, a little more twinkling, as senile old Major Gowen.
It’s all still more of a sitcom than a stage play. Cleese has woven three episodes (The Hotel Inspectors, Communication Problems and The Germans) into a 90-minute whole – fairly seamlessly, although Basil’s hospital visit in The Germans has been cut, and with it a stitch (contextualising his later mania) is dropped. But there isn’t a narrative backbone, far less character development, of the type that might sustain an actual play. Lack of development, indeed, is the point of sitcoms like Fawlty Towers, which traps its protagonists claustrophobically together, taunting them with fleeting possibilities of escape. If like me you ever found the TV show almost too painful, too stressful, to laugh at – well, you’ll feel that here too, as Basil fails and fails again to get some simple thing done (“I could spend the rest of my life in this conversation!”), blood vessels bursting all over the place.
If you’re not always laughing, you’re admiring the comic architecture, whose brilliance is laid even more bare onstage than onscreen. The fire drill that isn’t a fire drill, even before an actual fire breaks out. Basil miming the name of his winning horse behind his disapproving wife’s back. The tiers of miscommunication when he finds himself discoursing with a deaf woman, the dithering Major, and a linguistically challenged Spaniard too. The climax of that latter scene, Manuel proudly announcing “I know nothing!”, prompts another of those applause breaks that have nothing to do with comedy and everything to do with love and nostalgia. As those cheers rightly suggest, this Fawlty Towers redux is no pale imitation of the original, but a very vivid one.
Booking at Apollo theatre, London, until 28 September
