Faulty Towers Dining Experience
Riotously good performance let down by mediocre food
The Very Best of the Edinburgh Festivals 2024
Review: Assembly Hall
Review: Orchestra of Sound
Review: After the Silence
It's a testament to the universality of the humour of Fawlty Towers that almost forty years after the original broadcast, audiences all over the world are packing every restaurant graced by Australian company Interactive Theatre International and its long-running tribute show, a nostalgia-fest that will delight most, even if it doesn't quite live up to the glory of the original.
The threesome are astonishing in their accuracy of their impersonations. Terence Frisch is an adorably gormless Manuel and gets the diners warmed-up wonderfully with a table-top rendition of 'Y Viva España'. Rob Langston is a superbly snobby, unhinged yet likeable Basil, yet it's Donna Gray who steals the show as Sybil, with one of the most spot-on, finely-grained, lovingly-observed impersonations punters are ever likely to see.
Whether by cunning design or accident, the food B'est serves up is remarkably like what you might expect to find in a 1970s British seaside resort. Bland potato-and-something soup, roast chicken and straight from the cash 'n' carry lemon tart. By no means inedible and unlike Mr "Waldorf Salad!", at least we get our food, though with tickets starting at £43, perhaps not quite what we paid for.
Only a third of the performance is scripted so whilst this does lend the performance an apt sense of unpredictability, the cast struggle in their improvisation to evoke the quality of the original Cleese-Booth writing. We don't get the gradual welling up of the tension within Basil leading to the usual meltdown at the end, and instead get a procession of trotted out set-pieces – the false teeth in the soup, the rat and, of course, the goose step. All terrific good fun and rapturously received by the majority of the audience who are devotees of the TV show, but anyone looking for something as expertly crafted as the original will be a tad disappointed.