Fawlty Towers is regularly voted the greatest ever British sitcom, so five decades after the madcap antics of the world’s worst hotelier were first broadcast it seemed ripe for a stage adaptation.
John Cleese was famously moved to co-write his comedy masterpiece with his then wife Connie Booth after the Monty Python team endured a stay at a rundown hotel run by a very strange and rude owner. Thus, the xenophobic, misogynistic and downright rude hotel owner Basil Fawlty was born.
Cleese has seamlessly weaved his three favourite episodes – The Hotel Inspectors, Communication Problems and The Germans – into what is now a classic British farce, featuring a ninety-minute Basil meltdown. In many ways the adaption is spot on for an audience who have come to see comedy gold recreated right in front of them, and that’s exactly what is delivered.
Cleese’s fast paced comedy writing is full of the classic wordplay and constant misdirection that makes for great farce, so we can simultaneously laugh at the hapless Basil, and yet somehow see some of our own flawed humanity in his increasingly desperate but doomed attempts to make things right.
In the always great Python team, the lanky Cleese was the most gifted physical comic by a country mile so the dilemma for the producer was finding someone as gifted. In the equally gangly Danny Bayne they have found just the man for the job as he charges round the stage recreating Basil’s manic energy, fuelled by pent up anger at a world he doesn’t really understand.
Bayne never loses sight of the fact he is playing a rude, boorish snob who somehow has become a comedy icon, and nails Basil’s irrational rage filled screeches. His recreation of Basil’s classic goose stepping in front of horrified German tourists as he tells everyone ‘Don’t mention the war’ is an absolute tour de force as an appreciative audience roars with laughter.
The women in this piece are the real heroes as they try to keep the hotel running and the late Prunella Scales was perfection in the TV series as Basil’s long suffering Wife Sybil. Mia Austin’s Sybil is full of the required world weariness, and not so quiet despair, as she verbally spars with a man she feels ‘manacled’ to.
Strictly star Joanne Clifton shows some subtle comic timing as Polly, and Jemma Churchill is great fun as the deaf snob Mrs Richards. Hemi Yeroham as hapless Spanish waiter Manuel is pitch perfect, and his delivery of the classic line ‘I know nothing’ is spot on, earning him big laughs.
Caroline Jay Ranger’s direction is pin sharp as it needs to be as the sheer pace of farce makes it a notoriously tricky medium to get right as some high profile, but unfunny, recent franchise shows have demonstrated in this very theatre. Liz Ascroft’s stage cleverly combines the hotel’s grim reception, soulless dining room and the bedrooms where further farcical misdemeanours take place.
If you are a Fawlty Towers fan from back in the day, then this greatest hits revival is perfect for you. If criminally you have managed to avoid one of all-time great sitcoms, then I dare you not to laugh at what is now a well well-executed British farce.
Fawlty Towers – The Play is at Leeds Playhouse until Saturday January 10th. To book 0113 2430808 or www.leedshertitagetheatres.com
Reviewer: Paul Clarke
Reviewed: 6th January 2026
North West End UK Rating: