Review: John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers: The Play at Leeds Grand Theatre

“…exactly the kind of chaos we came for…”

John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers: The Play by John Cleese, Leeds Grand Theatre

By Sean Sable

There’s a particular flavour of nostalgia that comes with growing up on British sitcoms that I admit to really enjoying. Alongside classics such as Blackadder and Are You Being Served?, Fawlty Towers has always held a special place in my heart. And what’s not to love? In its brief two-season run, Fawlty Towers offered all the absurdist escalation of Monty Python humour filtered through the painfully subversive politeness of a failing seaside hotel, serving up John Cleese at some of his manic best. So, when I heard the stage adaptation was touring, I felt that familiar pull of nostalgia. But trading on the past is a risky business, and I’ll admit I had some trepidation. But what I found wasn’t so much a reinvention, but a faithful, affectionate recreation that felt a bit less like a new production and more like stepping into a live studio recording of the original episodes themselves.

Adapted by John Cleese from three of the show’s most iconic episodes (The Hotel Inspectors, The Germans, and Communication Problems) the play stitches together some of the show’s most memorable storylines. From mistaken hotel inspectors to Germans who will hear talk of the war—whether they want it or not—the audience gets treated to a hit parade of laugh-out-loud moments. Director Caroline Jay Ranger has approached the material with reverence, assembling a production that prioritises precision and homage over experimentation and for some, that might feel limiting. But for me, it felt like coming home after school, putting in a familiar worn-out VHS and hitting play.

The audience was buzzing about the set from the moment we walked in. The two-level construction housed the lobby, staircase, entryway, and dining room on the ground floor, with a single guest bedroom perched above. The effect tapped perfectly into an uncanny valley of recognition. This was Fawlty Towers, rendered with such fidelity that it felt like I’d taken a step back over forty years. Of course, the Fawlty Towers sign was there too, letters rearranged just as they were in the show’s opening credits. For anyone who grew up with the series, there are little Easter eggs to be found everywhere, and I enjoyed picking out details one by one as they were uncovered throughout the evening.

Costumes, hair, and makeup felt lifted straight from my childhood. Period haircuts, badly fitting suits and wild 70s women’s hairstyles (did you grow up longing to wear Sybil’s iconic streak as much as I did?) were all rendered with such detail that it genuinely felt as though this production ambled out of a 1979 Argos catalogue.

I was curious about how anyone could step into John Cleese’s shoes, but Danny Bayne’s Basil Fawlty is a remarkable feat of comedic engineering: elastic, unhinged and manic, his performance was well modulated to allow for the slower burn that a longer theatre format demands. During the interval, I overheard someone wishing Bayne had “taken it up a notch” with the physical comedy but I disagree. Each episode of the TV show featured a gradual unravelling of Basil’s very last nerve and if Bayne had started at full meltdown and maintained that energy for ninety minutes, the joke would have worn thin by Act Two. Instead, he builds with great control, letting the absurdity escalate until Basil’s ultimate breakdown lands at just the right moment with just the right energy.

And Mia Austen’s Sybil is spookily accurate as well. I’ve always had a soft spot for Sybil. Her weary authority, her unflappable competence and the way she manages Basil with no room for his nonsense—Austen channels all of it, down to the very last braying laugh. Equally, Joanne Clifton’s Polly captured that very specific voice affectation: soft, feminine, almost transatlantic, yet not quite RP. It’s a sound you don’t hear much anymore outside of satire, so it was wonderful to see it played with period-accurate earnestness. Hemi Yeroham’s Manuel (from Barcelona) stole several scenes with a sweet sincerity you can’t help but love.

During the interval, I overheard a lot of conversation about how closely the production hewed to the original episodes and the chatter led to some delightful debate. Some wished for a new story, something that would surprise them, whilst others were happy to simply revisit a familiar friend. It was easy to see both sides of the equation. On one hand, I would genuinely love to see a brand new Fawlty Towers story. On the other, productions like this trade heavily on nostalgia, and I’m not sure how audiences (myself included) would react if they didn’t get their favourite moments.

Certainly, a modernised Fawlty Towers is deliciously intriguing, and I’d love to see Basil in a situation we haven’t encountered before, or perhaps even a slightly reimagined Basil for a different era. But the existence of that hypothetical production doesn’t diminish how delightful this one was. Fawlty Towers: The Play felt like a comfy pair of slippers and a woolly blanket that soon caught fire and knocked over a grandfather clock, and that is exactly the kind of chaos we came for. 

John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers: The Play plays at Leeds Grand Theatre until Saturday 10 January. Tickets are available here.

Sean Sable is a Yorkshire-based freelance writer and editor specialising in Young Adult and Horror fiction, frequently at the same time. When she isn’t buried under a pile of books and manuscripts, she is looking for her keys and having extensive one-sided conversations, in Swedish, with her deaf cat. You can find her online at: www.seansable.co.uk