Faulty Towers The Dining Experience

This is certainly different. When you arrive at the venue you are sent into the alley beside the restaurant which is the venue and told “this isn’t a queue, it’s a people gathering experience”. As we waited we were eventually witness to a row and break down in communication between Basil Faulty and his wife Sybil, and some misunderstanding and fun and games with put upon waiter Manuel.I’m assuming there is no point in explaining who these characters are, as if you don’t know the fantastic sitcom, Fawlty Towers, from which they come then you aren’t the target audience. These aren’t the “real” characters of course, but all well impersonated by the three performers.Basil eventually assigns each person or group to a table (whilst managing to be rude in true Fawlty style to all and sundry. He looked me up and down and sneered “nice of you to dress up)”. With only a little bit of (deliberate) fuss all 93 of us were seated for dinner. As my dinner companion and sat down at a table with two strangers at first I thought we’d struck gold – they were speaking in a guttural foreign language. Could they possibly be German, and if so, how far would Basil go in humiliating them?As it turns out, they were Dutch, but they were duly humiliated anyway - as we all were. My companion and I were soon recognised as “pretentious arty types” and referred to accordingly throughout the two hour meal. No one was safe from Basil’s sarcasm and bile. The food was served (eventually) and was okay, though Sybil’s “joke’ that it’s amazing what you can get to “boil in the bag’ was perhaps a little to close to the truth. As your critic I didn’t pay for my ticket, but at nearly forty quid a head (excluding drinks) the food on its own certainly is extremely over-priced.It’s not really about the food, though, and as our impersonating trio continued to rattle through some set pieces (Basil the Rat, dentures in soup etc) we did come to accept them as the originals (though Manuel the waiter physically resembled Ricky Gervais more than Andrew Sachs.) All three performers did remarkably well in “sharing” themselves amongst all the diners in what is a difficult performance space. I was at the lunch sitting, and I suspect the dinner sitting may be potentially more raucous, especially if you are part of a large party. As a piece of emersive theatre it’s pretty slick, though in the end it made me want to watch the original episodes.