80s hearthrob and Strictly pro star in throwback to hotel of horrors

With big names like Prunella Scales, Connie Booth, John Cleese, and Andrew Sachs backing the original Fawlty Towers television run, it’s hard not to walk into the New Theatre to watch its first night without a bit of doubt.

But I can assuredly say the play did not disappoint.

Fawlty Towers checked into the New Theatre Oxford with a gloriously chaotic stage adaptation that feels like a love letter to the original series.

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Danny Bayne and John Cleese (Image: Trevor Leighton)

Even if you know every episode by heart, this stage version serves up enough new flourishes and perfectly executed farce to make a return visit to Fawlty Towers feel irresistible.

Standing in for Danny Bayne, understudy Adam Elliot played the eternally exasperated Basil, capturing Cleese’s Fawlty’s wit and sarcasm but ensuring the live audience see and laugh at every moment.

Mia Austen, a heavy weight in West End theatre, played the razor-sharp Sybil Fawlty nailing everything down from her walk to her outrageous shrill of a laugh, with her typical phone call to avoid doing any work sending you right back to the original episodes.

Paul Nicholas plays the delightfully bumbling Major in Fawlty Towers: The Play, capturing the character’s absent-minded eccentricity with gentle humour and old-school charm. His performance mirrors the beloved TV original while adding a stage-friendly warmth that lands especially well with live audiences.

Joanne Clifton’s Polly is sharp, capable and quietly exasperated, grounding the hotel’s chaos with quick thinking and dry wit.

The ensemble timing is tight, the set cleverly evokes the shabby Torquay hotel, and the famous set pieces – from malfunctioning catering to catastrophic guest relations – are reimagined with inventive physical comedy.

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John Cleese (Image: Trevor Leighton)

Born out of a stay at the now-demolished Gleneagles Hotel in Torquay while filming Monty Python, John-Cleese based his Basil Fawlty on the hotel’s owner who he later called “he rudest man I’ve ever come across in my life”.

From critcising guests table etiquette, throwing their briefcases out of a window in case it “contained a bomb” and a view from Michael Palin that his guests were seen as a “colossal inconvenience” Cleese certainly didn’t have to dig deep for his rude Fawlty.

No comedy show has had quite the impact that Fawlty Towers does, with only two series consisting of twelve episodes overall it would be remiss to say an audience couldn’t even build a fan base of of it in the modern world.