John Cleese and Connie Booth’s sublime ’70s sitcom about a tightly wound hotelier and his hopeless staff was ubiquitous for decades, back when repeats were a meaningful thing. Times change, and perhaps the fact that it’s no longer on our screens much is what’s allowed Cleese’s own stage adaptation to take root. ‘Fawlty Towers’ (the play) is absolutely not an attempt to boldly reinvent the adventures of Basil, Sybil, Manuel and co for the twenty-first century. Rather it’s stitched together from three classic episodes: ‘The Hotel Inspector’, ‘The Germans’ and ‘Communication Problems’. It sounds like they’ll be woven into a single narrative with a new ending, but whether you’re a long-term fan or too young to have ever seen it, it sounds like you’ll be pretty much getting ‘Fawlty Towers’ in its classic form. Director Caroline Jay Ranger is known for putting classic telly on the stage, being responsible for the ‘Only Fools and Horses’ musical and having worked with Cleese on Monty Python’s final live shows in 2014.
Whether the cast can compete with the memories of Cleese, Booth, Andrew Sachs and Prunella Scales is TBC but should be interesting to witness: heading up the production will be Adam Jackson-Smith (Basil), Anna-Jane Casey (Sybil), Hemi Yeroham (Manuel) and Victoria Fox (Polly).
