llanblogger's review of Fawlty Towers by the Twenty Club at Llangollen Town Hall
THEY made only a dozen episodes back in the mid-seventies but Fawlty Towers rapidly grabbed a place in the TV hall of fame as possibly the funniest show ever to come out of Britain.
And Llangollen Twenty Club’s interpretation of this comedy
icon is also likely to go down in local history as one of its best ever
productions.
Those lucky enough to have seen it at the Town Hall – there
wasn’t a ticket to be had for the sell-out Friday and Saturday performances but
a few seats were available for the rare Saturday matinee – will testify to just
how hilarious it was.
But then they could hardly go wrong when the man taking the
lead role of Basil Fawlty was the very personification of the lanky lunatic who
runs the county’s most dysfunctional hotel with his bone-idle and domineering
wife Sybil.
Despite his tender years,
Ally Goodman has already impressed in a number of Twenty Club
productions but Fawlty is surely his finest hour to date.
Not only did he look uncannily like the super-rude and
outrageously ham-fisted mine host but he also captured his manic mannerisms and
sardonic speech patterns to a tee.
He shone in the first two parts of this three-episode homage
to the great show, The Hotel Inspectors
and A Touch of Class, but positively
– and quite literally - burst into flames in the final act based on that
unforgettable episode when a group of Germans come to stay at the Newquay hotel
and Basil, still reeling from the concussion he sustained from a runaway
extinguisher when a blaze breaks out in the kitchen but determined not to
mention the war, unintentionally fires off a salvo of Nazi-related insults as
he takes their lunch orders.
Every offensive phrase gets him deeper in the mire, from his
“Eva Braun cocktail” to his “hors d’oevres must be obeyed”.
But in the end it’s his unabashed goose-stepping Hitler
impersonation which brings the medics dashing into the hotel to cart him back
to hospital where he belongs.
If no decent Fawlty
Towers interpretation could function without a brilliant Basil then it must
also have a marvellous Manuel – the bumbling waiter from Barcelona of whom his
vicious boss says it would have been easier to train a monkey.
Here fate and some
great casting provided the Twenty Club with another delicious dead ringer in
the shape of Richard Mascarenhas
From his hangdog look and droopy moustache to his baggy
trousers and duck-like walk he was every inch the hapless Spaniard who is
tortured almost as much by the vaguries of the English language as the insults
and slaps of Fawlty.
Manuel would have dominated every scene he was in if his
overbearing nemesis Basil hadn’t been on stage at the same time to give him a
real run for his comedic money.
Fawlty’s wife Sybil is such a little baggage that she ought
to be able to keep her monstrous husband in check but not even her own
insufferability is enough and, in fact, only serves to make him even worse.
Portraying all this with suitable nuance is quite a task but
one Twenty Club first-timer Helen Belton was perfectly up to. She was understated yet still formidable in
the role.
The rest of the cast shone too, from Bill Large as the
drunken buffoon Major Gowen to Anna Turner as Polly the maid who is possibly
the only completely sane member of the hotel’s surreal staff team.
In all there were about 20 of them on stage at various times
and where they were and what they were
supposed to be doing at any given moment in the madhouse that was Fawlty Towers was a herculean logistical
task which director Chrissie Ashworth managed as competently as any wartime
general.
Sorry, I forgot, don’t mention the war!
