The full cast in the finale to John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers The Play. Picture: Hugo Glendinning
WHEN Monty Python alumnus John Cleese opened Fawlty Towers The Play at London’s Apollo Theatre in May 2024, he was “more confident about it than almost anything I’ve ever done”.
After two sold-out West End seasons, a ten-month 39-venue UK tour was launched in September 2025, visiting Leeds Grand Theatre in early January and now the Grand Opera House in York this week.
“I know all the lines,” said the lady in the stalls row behind your reviewer at Wednesday’s well-attended matinee. Such has been the permeation of the coastal hotel shenanigans of Cleese and Connie Booth’s beloved BBC sitcom, whose 50th anniversary was the trigger for Cleese to mount the stage show, directed with comedic elan by Caroline Jay Ranger.
Just as Eric Idle adapted the 1975 film Monty Python And The Holy Grail for the hit stage musical Monty Python’s Spamalot, so Cleese, now 86, is on to a winner with Fawlty Towers The Play. Hapless Spanish waiter Manuel may say “I know nothing”, but Cleese knows everything about how to transfer Basil and Sybil’s trials and tribulations from small screen to stage.
Whereas Idle affectionately subtitled Spamalot “A New Musical (Lovingly) Ripped Off From The Motion Picture”, Cleese has adapted three of the most cherished episodes – The Hotel Inspectors, Communication Problems and The Germans – to form two Acts, concluding the madcap proceedings with a new finale.
“The English do love a farce,” observed Cleese, whose play has the classic structure, physical silliness and comic verve of the works of Ben Travers, Brian Rix and Ray Cooney. He named Michael Frayn’s Noises Off and Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors too, and you will be laughing equally as frequently at Basil’s antics in Fawlty Towers live on stage.
There is an added factor here: familiarity, a feeling as comforting as a well worn pair of slippers or a favourite sofa or the sound of Dennis Wilson’s TV theme tune. That familiarity begins the moment you settle in your seat and take in Liz Ascroft’s open-plan set design of the hotel reception desk, the stairs to Mrs Richards’ first-floor bedroom, the dining room and the doors to the kitchen.
Above, to one side, stands a model of the frontage of Fawlty Towers, in the English Riviera town of Torquay. In the middle is a cut-out of the roof; to the other side is the Fawlty Towers sign – and yes, the order of the letters will be changed for Act Two in the tradition of the TV series. The first word becomes ‘Flowery’; over to you to work out the second!
Ascroft’s design sticks faithfully to the British mid-Seventies, with its ghastly colour palette, and her costume design does likewise, from ill-fitting shiny suits for assorted men to Sybil’s trademark pink two-piece The Malcolm Macdonald-style massive sideburns of Adam Elliott’s Mr Walt are a particular retro joy.
Elliott is part of a 17-strong cast – so rare to have such a large troupe for a tour these days – that is led by Danny Bayne as the deluded, crane-legged hotel proprietor Basil Fawlty and Mia Austen as his acerbic, haughty, exasperated but exasperating wife Sybil.
Cleese once described bolshy Basil as “rude but inefficient”, and Bayne’s characterisation captures that essence, relishing Fawlty’s irascibility, his propensity to ingratiate guests one moment, then treat them as a verbal punch bag the next.
Throughout, Bayne’s Basil finds Austen’s always right Sybil to be the bane of his frustrated life, and the more you watch his pratfalls, the more it strikes you how he is the opposite of many comedy favourites.
We love Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin because they ultimately win, like Shakespeare’s clowning fools. Fawlty, by contrast, only worsens his situation, tripping himself up with every utterance and foiled plan, and he is all the funnier for that, sharing the loser status of Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder, albeit but without the intelligence and cunning to keep escaping.
Caroline Jay Ranger chalked up an earlier West End touring hit with the musical version of Only Fools And Horses that shared Fawlty Towers The Play’s sense of celebration of a British classic, while drawing performances from her cast that mirror the television versions but still bring new life to them too.
Especially so here from the veteran Paul Nicholas, still twinkling in marvellously mischievous comic form as the bumbling Major and Hemi Yerohem’s Barcelona waiter Manuel, the butt of so much Basil intemperance. Seeing such characters in the flesh adds still more to the comedic joy.
Joanne Clifton, swapping the song and dance of musical theatre for the straightest role here, is a delight as unflappable chamber maid Polly Sherman, echoing Connie Booth’s distinctive voice too. Jemma Churchill’s Mrs Richards, even grouchier than Basil, is the nightmare hotel guest personified, barking and snapping while refusing to turn up her hearing aid.
Look out too for the double-act cameos of Emily Winter and Dawn Buckland’s old ladies, Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby, and Greg Haiste’s Mr Hutchinson, Mrs Richards’ rival as Basil’s most irritating hotel guest.
Fawlty Towers The Play is fawltless: British comedy at its best, farcical and furious, utterly Seventies yet timeless too. Make a reservation, now.
John Cleese’s Fawlty Towers The Play, Grand Opera House, York, until Saturday, 7.30pm plus 2.30pm Thursday and Saturday matinees. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.