Fawlty Towers The Play (Apollo Theatre, London)
Verdict: Fawltless antique
Shamelessly recycled, fifty-year-old comic material it may be. But as shamelessly recycled 50-year-old comic material goes, John Cleese and Connie Booth’s stage replica of their classic TV comedy, Fawlty Towers, is still very good fun.
It’s such a high-quality copy of the 1975 original that if you look closely, you might even find it says ‘Made In China’ on the bottom. Fawlty Towers purists will be relieved to learn there is nothing new to see here.
Instead, this is a tightly wrought highlights package, distilling the fire drill fiasco, the wall-mounted moose debacle, and the fateful fiver secretly bet on the horse Dragonfly.
Into the carefully choreographed chaos step deaf old battleaxe Mrs Richards (a peerlessly contemptuous Rachel Izen), undercover hotel inspectors and many others, including… the Germans.
Being live adds frisson, but this is a risk-free re-run unthreatened by ‘new material’. Caroline Jay Ranger’s production offers her company all the creative freedom that Kim Jong Un grants the people of North Korea.
It’s shamelessly recycled, but John Cleese and Connie Booth’s stage replica of their classic TV comedy, Fawlty Towers, is still very good fun
It’s such a high-quality copy of the 1975 original that if you look closely, you might even find it says ‘Made In China ’ on the bottom
And Liz Ashcroft’s staging distils the chintzy Torquay hotel into an open plan design faux pas — from lobby with flock wallpaper and dining room with lacy tablecloths, to upstairs bedroom sans sea view.
Adam Jackson-Smith is a faultless avatar of Basil, down to the long moustache muffling his sotto voce sarcasm. He leaps adroitly to attention at Sybil’s shrieking threats to his manhood (‘you’ll have to sew them back on first…’), but he’s also supple enough to do the swivelling, head-bandaged goose step for the bewildered Germans.
Anna-Jane Casey’s Sybil is likewise a Prunella Scales carbon copy, while Hemi Yeroham has the exact rubber-ball bounce of Andrew Sachs’s waiter from Barcelona, Manuel. Victoria Fox has the swimming head movements and mid-Atlantic accent of Connie Booth’s Polly, and Paul Nichols is as blissfully oblivious as Ballard Berkeley’s mystified Major.
It’s as if time has stood still for this fine reproduction of a vintage mid-century antique. I suggest you book an en suite.
It’s as if time has stood still for this fine reproduction of a vintage mid-century antique. I suggest you book an en suite
Withnail & I (Birmingham Rep)
Verdict: Not nailed
For some of us — myself in particular — Withnail & I is the holy of holies. The greatest film of all time. The Desert Island Flick I’d save from the waves. I’ve always loved the sweetly sad story of two young actors at the butt end of the swinging Sixties, heading for the Lake District in the hope of respite from poverty, pills and booze. Like British pork in the sinister TV ads of the period, it’s got the lot.
Some of the dialogue has passed into folklore (‘we’ve gone on holiday by mistake!’). It has sensational characters ranging from the two self-dramatising leads of Richard E. Grant and Paul McGann, to Richard Griffiths’ rhapsodic Uncle Monty, and the Cumbrian poacher who keeps live eels down his trousers.
Then there’s the gorgeously melancholy soundtrack, opening with a jazz version of Whiter Shade Of Pale — matching the rain saturated beauty of the Lake District.
To mess with such perfection might seem folly. But given that the film’s writer and director, Bruce Robinson, wrote this new adaptation in Birmingham and that comedy director Sean Foley is at the helm, there was hope.
And if we miss the famous tractor of farmer Parkin (leg bound in polythene), we do get a nice little fencing match in the Cumbrian cottage.
For some of us — myself in particular — Withnail & I is the holy of holies. The greatest film of all time. The Desert Island Flick I’d save from the waves
We must also salute Robert Sheehan for taking on Richard E. Grant’s Withnail — still the best ever drunk acting on screen (performed by a lifelong teetotaller).
But Sheehan does like to showboat, and isn’t ill or angst-ridden enough to win our affection.
Adonis Siddique, however, does win hearts with a gentle reincarnation of ‘I’ or ‘Marwood’ — his drug-induced panic and wistful commentary more than just a comic turn.
Malcolm Sinclair ensures flamboyant uncle Monty remains a rueful, Edwardian throwback, and there are nice touches from Adam Young as nasally philosopher and drug dealer Danny.
But live music giving cover versions of The Kinks Sunny Afternoon and Norman Greenbaum’s Spirit In The Sky sounds more like a pub band.
Nor can creaky sets or animated projections touch the film’s visual cornucopia.
It made me laugh a bit, and smile a lot. But it didn’t enter — or break — my heart. For that I must return to the film.
Withnail & I runs until May 25. Fawlty Towers is booking until September 28.
