Fawlty Towers The Play

Set wise, it's exactly what you’d expect. A mock-up of the hotel, with the lobby, the dining room and one of the rooms on display. The costumes are very period specific, given that the show is set in the mid seventies. The characters retain their iconic looks, creating something of a replica of the show, which is what you’d expect from this particular stage adaptation given that it already has an in-built audience. 

We went into this show completely blind, unsure of what to expect. The show works pretty well as a farce, with each character trapped in a place they don’t want to be, unable to leave despite various attempts. It makes for some great naturalistic comedy.

Yet we found that a lot of the comedy felt a bit outdated for a modern audience, particularly the storyline about “The Germans”, which centres around Basil becoming concussed by a moose head and insulting the newly arrived German guests by making insensitive jokes about the war. It didn’t provoke much of a reaction from the audience and felt very out of place amongst the other two storylines, which felt a bit more universal.