Fawlty Towers The Play

Apollo Theatre

★★★

Rather like director Caroline Jay Ranger’s previous small-screen to West End adaptation of Only Fools and Horses, this stage version of a classic TV comedy could have been much worse than it is. In fact it is everything one could hope for.

John Cleese has taken three of the 12 eternally funny episodes written by him and Connie Booth and combined them into one very busy day at the hotel in which the German guests arrive, that mounted moose falls on Fawlty’s head and the planned fire drill goes terribly wrong – and real.

Key to this production’s success is that a very convincing Fawlty has been found in actor Adam Jackson-Smith. Physically he isn’t quite as rangy or the “overgrown stick insect” – as Sybil once put it – that Cleese was, but vocally he is spot on.

Also excellent is the Jewish Turkish actor Hemi Yeroham whose Manuel is pitch perfect. Much like Andrew Sachs’s original he manages to be brilliantly confused yet allows the Spanish waiter’s dignity to remain intact (although apparently that is not the way the Spanish saw it.)

The evening works partly because it is buoyed by the audience’s love of the original. On more than one occasion they say the lines out loud – “Satisfied customer. We should have him stuffed” – before the actors do. Anywhere else – “To be or not to be” – and it would ruin everything. But here it doesn’t really matter.

True, three sitcom episodes do not a play maketh as the old saying goes (okay I made it up) but a certain manic delirium is reached. And you can’t really expect more than that.