Faulty Towers the Dining Experience involves the fascinating concept of inviting customers to willingly pay for bad service. For those that somehow don’t know the show, Fawlty Towers is an immensely popular British television series written and starred in by John Cleese and Connie Booth. It was inspired by a stay at a hotel in Torquay.

So this is an interactive theatre piece in a restaurant based on a TV show based on a real life experience. Chunks of the material heavily reference (recycle) the script of the television show.

When you go to a show named Faulty Towers you expect chaos and this ensues immediately with the staff still setting up the tables in the restaurant and Andy Foreman as Manuel desperately trying to herd the audience into arbitrary areas. When you eventually get to your table, you will find that you have an overabundance of certain utensils. On top of this, glasses, drinks, and other restaurant miscellanea disappear and reappear arbitrarily piling high on some tables and plunging dangerously low on others. 

The service is so bizarre that there are even items hidden in the food and at this point the show takes on a treasure hunt feel. Luckily the food from The Church is good enough to never have been served in the original Fawlty Towers dining room, if you are apprehensive about trying it. 

This show is a great excuse for anyone acting as Basil Faulty to be extremely rude to people and get laughed at benignly in return. It is an interesting social exercise, especially when you see some customers getting into the spirit of things by taking sides against certain characters and even some who start to enjoy tormenting Manuel.  

The antics of Manuel include removing the clothing of patrons, and serving nuts in the most roundabout way possible. He is frequently hauls off of the customers, much to the delight of the audience, as everyone enjoys interactive theatre as long as it happens to someone else. You do learn very interesting things from Manuel in this show, for example, I now know that my coat is not very good for hiding rat cages in. His slapstick performance even includes a moment where customers are frantically removing breakable items from the table and Manuel rolls past. On the table.

Karen Hamilton plays Sybil and she does her terrible laugh perfectly. Hamilton works the room well, making small talk with the guests, in particular encouraging the women to start training their men early and sharing techniques. She whips out the biting remarks and smugly enjoys humiliating Basil.

The on-edge Ron Kelly has mastered the twitching and the barking required for Basil but doesn’t quite get to the heights of blistering rage that Cleese does.

I had some trepidation about this show, being a huge fan of the television series. I was worried it would not do the iconic originals justice. It is clear they are not the original but they are good representations. This can especially be seen in the voices where the tone, modulation and inflection have been well studied.

This dining experience, in spite of its famously bad service, is well worth seeing. The majority of the audience left with jaws aching from laughing uproariously for nearly two solid hours. 

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