Manuel will help you with your bags but don’t mention the war, the West End stage version of iconic sitcom Fawlty Towers has just been extended for a second time. Earlier this year David Hennessy was at the launch where he heard from the original Basil Fawlty John Cleese and the rest of the cast.
John Cleese’s new stage adaptation of his iconic sitcom Fawlty Towers has just been extended for a second time on the West End, now running until 1 March 2025.
The new show came 50 years after the original was filmed at BBC Studios in 1974.
Originally written by John Cleese and his then wife Connie Booth, Fawlty Towers has been named as ‘the greatest British sitcom of all time’ by Radio Times.
It followed the travails of Basil Fawlty, a tense, rude and put upon hotel owner played by Cleese himself in one of his most famous roles.
The staff of the dysfunctional hotel is completed by Basil’s bossy wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), Spanish waiter Manuel (Andrew Sachs) who struggles with English and chambermaid Polly who was played by Connie Booth.
Only running for two series and 12 episodes, the show’s quality never dipped which is no doubt why in 2000 it was voted the best British programme of all time in a British Film Institute poll.
Now the Monty Python creator has adapted his hit series into a stage show which will have its first run at the Apollo Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue in London from 15 May although it has already opened for previews.
Cleese has written a two-hour play based on three of the original TV episodes.
There is also now a television reboot in the works with Cleese writing a new Fawlty Towers series with his daughter Camilla.
The play is directed by Caroline Jay Ranger.
Adam Jackson-Smith takes on the role of the inimitable Basil Fawlty.
Sybil is played by Anna-Jane Casey.
Manuel is played by Hemi Yeroham while Victoria Fox plays Polly.
The Major is played by Paul Nicholas.
The Irish World was at the Apollo Theatre earlier this year for a special preview of some scenes from the production as well as a Q and A with John Cleese and the cast.
John Cleese said after seeing the cast run through the scenes: “I thought that was awfully good.
“It’s the first time they’ve ever done it in front of an audience and the problem about a comedy is the laughter because comedy is all about timing.
“What these guys have to learn in the next 2 or 3 weeks is where the audience laughs and whether it’s a small laugh or a medium sized laugh or a big laugh, so the audience becomes almost part of what’s going on onstage.
“People laugh much more in big numbers than they do if there’s just two of them watching television so all this business about learning now is not just learning to perform- which is excellent at the moment- but how to hold it there because you know that there’s a big laugh or the line that we all thought was hilarious, isn’t and you’ve got to go straight on without hanging around waiting for the laugh.”
Asked if he would be precious with his well known creation, Cleese said: “No, because I don’t like that. I don’t like directors who behave as if they own the whole thing. We had a lovely thing at the last rehearsal.
“I said to the whole cast, ‘We’ve got a problem there at that moment’, and I told them what the moment was.
“Then I said, ‘CJ and I don’t know how to solve it, do you guys have any ideas?’
“And within two minutes she (Anna Jane Casey who plays Sybil) comes along and tells us how to solve the thing.
“If you involve a lot of people in the process, everyone becomes creative. They feel much more that they’re part of it.
“What I don’t like is directors who have a ‘vision’ and everyone has got to do exactly what they say.
“Why use the intelligence of one man when you can have the intelligence of the whole group?
“I think of myself as a writer who happens to perform.
“If you want to understand the Monty Python group, they were all writers who happened to perform so we always start with the script and therefore if you’ve written a part, you don’t necessarily think that only one person is ever going to play it.
“I enjoy working with actors enormously because it’s a very co-operative process.
“As I say I don’t like people who say, ‘Take a pause there’.
“I like saying, ‘What do you feel about taking a pause there?’
“So it becomes a two way process and it’s just enormous fun.
“I think it’s going to be tremendous, this, but I think it will be tremendous in June.
“In June people will have figured out where the laughs are and know exactly how to play the thing.
“When you’ve got a comedy or a farce, as I say, the audience becomes part of it.
“You’ve got to do it in front of an audience and a lot of times before you get the timings exactly right.”
Adam Jackson-Smith, who plays Basil, said: “Obviously we all have John Cleese as Basil Fawlty in our minds but I’m an actor, I’m not an impersonator. That’s not a skill that I have.
“So myself and CJ and the rest of the cast have tried to approach it from a place of truth, to figure out who the guy is, what makes him tick and approach it from that place.”
Anna Jane Casey referred to the joy of playing Sybil who can paint on a smile for a guest one minute and telling off Basil the next.
John Cleese says: “I’ve always said it’s very easy for seven and eight-year-olds to understand Fawlty Towers.
“They can’t understand Python until they’re about 12 or 13 but at 8, they can understand it immediately because it’s about who is frightened of whom which all kids understand immediately.”
Anna- Jane Casey adds: “I’ve got two children but I’m around a lot of kids from the age of 18 down to about 9.
“The other day I took home three 9 year olds and a 12 year old in the back of my car, drop them off home.
“The little girl said to you, ‘You an actress?’
“I said, ‘Yeah’.
“’What are you doing?’
“I said, ‘Fawlty Towers, you won’t know it but your mum will’.
“She said, ‘No, no, no. It’s that show with the little guy, the tall man and the lady with the crazy hair’.
“So 9 year olds know it.”
Hemi Yeroham, who plays bumbling waiter Manuel, made a shocking admission.
He said: “It’s too late to get rid of me, I think, so I can admit I hadn’t watched Fawlty Towers before I got the job.
“I was born and raised in Istanbul, I came here when I was 20 to study drama so I was a bit unfamiliar with it.
“I think that worked to my advantage.
“I did (feel the shock of that admission) a little bit. “Somebody’s typing up a P45 as I’m speaking.
“I think that’s a good thing because then I approached it fresh, I didn’t have to worry too much about fitting into something.”
Victoria Fox, who plays maid Polly, said: “It’s been a job of a lifetime so far, it’s been extraordinary because it is so well loved.
“I grew up watching every episode, my father insisted on it and I’m really glad he did because now I have a sense of humour.”
When asked what attracted him to the role of the Major, Paul Nicholas said: “Well, I’m at that stage of my life where Peter Pan is no longer an option, so I’m at an age now where these kind of roles come up.
“I’m very, very fortunate to be part of this because it’s an iconic show.
“I’ve done quite a lot of shows over the years, and I’ve had more response from my neighbours about this show, ‘We’re coming, we’re coming, we’re coming’- ‘Alright, you’re coming!’”
The set shows the whole hotel so while a scene is taking place with Sybil checking guests in at reception, you may also be able to see Basil having an issue with someone else upstairs.
John Cleese says: “That’s why farce is better played in the theatre than anywhere else because once you’re on television or even film then there’s a guy called an editor who makes the choice about where you’re looking and on a farce you want to sit in the middle of the stalls not too close and then you see all the different things going on at the same time and that’s why I would rather watch a farce in a theatre than anywhere else.
“I fell in love with farce when I went to The Old Vic in the 60s and I saw A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau.
“Albert Finney was playing the youngster and I just never laughed like that in my life.
“I just fell in love with farce and particularly Feydeau farce, the stuff that was written in Paris in the 1890s which is superb.
“The craftsmanship of the plot was just phenomenal.
“When people are playing comedy, they’re told to be at ease and that’s when they’re funniest.
“That’s why if you’ve got a comedy, you want company that like each other.
“If you go to drama, it can sometimes help if they don’t.
“The Godfather was a famously unhappy and sort of bitchy set. They produced a great, great movie with that but in comedy, you have got to have that relaxation because then you start to play and you become more and more creative with the role you’re doing but that comes as the confidence comes.”
The character of Basil Fawlty was based on a real-life hotel owner, Donald Sinclair. John Cleese came up with the idea for the character after staying at Sinclair’s Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay and became fascinated with his incredibly rude behaviour.
On coming up with the idea John Cleese said: “I had lunch with (BBC Head of Comedy) Jimmy Gilbert, and Jimmy was a lovely man.
“He was a director/ producer of the Frost Report which is how I got to know him when I was working with the two Ronnies.
“I said I didn’t want to do any more Monty Pythons.
“The BBC in the old days was lovely so he said, ‘Well, what do you want to do?’
“And I said, ‘I’d like to do something with my wife because we laugh at the same things and she’s a wonderful actress’.
“And Jimmy said, ‘Why don’t you go away and talk to her and I’ll commission’.
“So Connie and I had a chat, lasted about 20 minutes and we agreed that we were going to set it in this hotel that we’d stayed in when the Pythons had gone down to Torquay to shoot for the Monty Python show.
“Connie was in it quite a lot which people forget and she came down and stayed at the hotel so we both had a close sighting of Donald Sinclair.
“I rang Jimmy Gilbert up and said, ‘We’d like to do something set in a hotel’.
“And he said fine,” John laughs. “And that was how the BBC used to work in the old days, now it would go through three committees none of whom would really have any idea what they were talking about.
“When we first handed the script in, this guy Ian Main said, ‘This is full of stereotypical characters and cliched situations, I cannot see it being anything other than a total disaster’.
“Isn’t that great?”
When did you know you had a hit on your hands?
“When Fawlty Towers started, I remember The Daily Mirror said after the second episode said, ‘Long John short on jokes’.
“There were a lot of people that didn’t particularly like it when it started.
“On Monty Python it was hilarious because the first series all the critics described what happened but they stayed away from whether it was good or bad, it was like they couldn’t commit themselves.
“It wasn’t until the second series of Fawlty Towers that Alan Coren, who was a big name in my day, he was the editor of Punch and he gave it a very good review in the Times and then suddenly everybody started to love it.
“Think what the critics made of Waiting for Godot when it started, they all hated it.
“There were only two critics who liked it, all the others didn’t.
“People on the whole don’t like things that are very original because there’s no familiarity but then they seem to get used to it, and then it starts to become a hit.
“But I never thought that Fawlty Towers would get bigger viewing figures than Monty Python which of course it did.”
Why was there only 12 episodes?
“It was very simple.
“Connie and I used to take six weeks to write an episode and no one in sitcom history has taken more than about ten days, but if you give yourself six weeks, over that period of time you come up with more comedy ideas than if you were trying to write it in a week.
“We felt after the 12 shows that we’d done the best we could possibly do and that if we did another series, people would probably say, ‘It was very funny but it wasn’t as good as the first two series’.
“In which case why do it if you’re not desperate for the money?
“The main thing was we didn’t start writing dialogue for at least two weeks, maybe three because if you get a series of funny situations, it’s very easy to write the dialogue. If the situations themselves are not that funny, then you have to write a lot of jokes.”
What do you think was the secret to its longevity and success?
“I think it was, to be perfectly honest, that the scripts were so good and the cast was good so it’s got real quality but I think that Basil exemplified a certain kind of probably lower middle class figure like the people that I grew up with in Weston Super Mare who had shoe shops and the fact that those people always think it’s a terrible loss of face to be angry.
“To say ‘he lost his temper’ means you lose something, you lose control whereas people who can use their anger to provide them energy doesn’t mean that they have to lose control, they can use their anger in a more constructive way.
“The sad thing about our culture now is that we’ve been infected by the American view that if you’re not rich or famous, you’re a bit of a failure, and no one in Weston Super Mare in my day felt that.
“They were all having perfectly decent lives and they were nice and polite and kind to people.
“I just think the key to Basil, of course, is repression because people like that don’t want to lose their temper and everyone is trying to be polite and actually being angry isn’t funny but suppressing anger is funny.
“That’s the big difference.”
Times have changed since Fawlty Towers first delighted audiences and nowhere more than in comedy is that obvious.
Now that comedies and other programmes often come with trigger warnings or censored scenes, John was asked if anything had been changed for a more modern audience.
“I think there was a scene where the Major used a couple of words you can’t use now, racial slurs they would come under so we took that out.
“There’s always a problem with comedy that you deal with the literal minded.
“I remind you of ‘Til Death Do Us Part.
“People were laughing at that wonderful central performance, Alf Garnett.
“People were roaring with laughter at him, not with him but there were also people saying, ‘Thank God these things are being said at last’, you see what I mean?
“So whenever you’re doing comedy, you’re up against the literal minded and the literal minded don’t understand irony and that means if you take them seriously, you get rid of a lot of comedy.
“Because literal minded people don’t understand metaphor and they don’t understand irony and they don’t understand comic exaggeration.
“These are people who are not, so far as understanding what other human beings are saying and doing, they’re not playing with a full deck.”
They don’t understand it’s a joke..
“That’s right but they still wouldn’t think it was funny because literal minded people can only have one interpretation of what’s been said and that’s the literal minded one.
“People who are not literal minded can see there’s various different interpretations depending on different context.
“I was reading something written about a month ago and somebody was pointing out the extraordinary number of really funny comedy shows that were on our screen in 1991 and it was an extraordinary number, there was something like 30 really funny comedies.
“And now I don’t know that people can name more than one or two comedies and why is that?
“I don’t know.
“I think that half the trouble in the world is that there’s been too much change because I know from those books I wrote with Robin Skynner that what stresses people is change.
“Whether it’s good change or bad change doesn’t matter, it’s change.
“I think everything is changing so fast now, I think everyone is getting very anxious and when people get anxious, they behave in a more ratty sort of way and are more likely to become more and more literal minded.
“I don’t know what you do about that. Uninvent the internet, I suppose.”
Anyone who goes to see the show will hear those iconic lines ‘Don’t mention the war’ as one of the stories incorporated into the new script is the one of the German guests who come to the hotel.
John says: “Every film that I saw when I was young seemed to be a war film and the Germans were always portrayed as Nazis, and therefore Basil’s insensitivity to the present generation would almost certainly be funny.
“I do a lot of shows in Germany.
“For example, I did a tour in Europe last year. I think I did about 35 shows and the best audience reactions we got were in Stuttgart and Munich. They were the best and we went everywhere.
“I’ve always thought the Germans have got a perfectly good sense of humour but the caricature which we saw in all those war pictures, I think, is still part of our view of the Germans and the Sun newspaper would bear that out.”
Fawlty Towers is at Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue until 1 March 2025.
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