Freshly minted farce is funniest show in town
ADAPTING a much-loved television comedy series for the stage is a risky business.Theatre versions of Only Fools and Horses, Some Mothers Do ’Ave ’Em and Drop the Dead Donkey have met with varying degrees of success.
But when you take the greatest comedy series in British TV history you take your life in your hands. John Cleese may be a controversial national treasure but his alter ego Basil Fawlty is, ironically, faultless.
Forty-five years after Fawlty Towers was first transmitted, Cleese has taken three of the 12 episodes he wrote with Connie Booth and threaded them together seamlessly.
The gang’s all here – Basil’s termagant wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Spanish waiter Manuel (Hemi Yeroham), stealthily efficient chambermaid Polly (Victoria Fox), permanent resident Major (Paul Nicholas) and, of course, Basil himself (Adam Jackson-Smith).
By not adding anything new or making concessions to fashionable sensibilities, Cleese has kept the scripts largely intact to the extent that some audience members cannot refrain from shouting out the punchlines before the cast. Director Caroline Jay Ranger ensures that the comedy timing is immaculate.
Consequently, Basil’s calamities appear both familiar and freshly minted – trying to hide his winnings from a horse race, misidentifying a hotel inspector, a messed-up fire drill, a recalcitrant moose head and the arrival of German guests (“Do they outnumber us?”).
It has the accumulating momentum of farce because it is farce and the cast play it to the hilt, particularly Fox who channels Connie Booth with supernatural ease and Rachel Izen as the demanding Mrs Richards. But it wouldn’t work as well without a perfect Basil, and Jackson-Smith is well nigh perfect.
Combining the looks of Henry Cavill with the elastic physicality of Cleese, he pulls off the feat of not just recreating Basil but embodying John Cleese as Basil. He’s nailed the voice and the stance, the barely bottled apoplexy, the long pauses of utter bewilderment and the vitriolic asides so well you might be looking at the younger Cleese himself.
While some may be disappointed at the lack of new material most of us will revel in the precision-tooled chaos, the ever-sharp wit and the chance to see Basil goose-stepping across the stage. It’s the funniest show in town.