Leigh Kelly as Manuel in Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience.
Oh yes, Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience is certainly an experience.
Ever wonder what it would be like to be a guest at the poorly run hotel at the centre of the cult 1970s BBC television comedy, Fawlty Towers? Well, lousy service, a mediocre meal and a dessert that appears to consist of slices of a store-bought snack cake can all be yours as part of this parasitical entertainment that originated in Australia in 1997 and has yet to die.
While you eat, or wait interminably for your chicken to arrive, Benedict Holme scampers around tables set up in a windowless room in Toronto's Sony Centre, doing a spot-on impersonation of John Cleese as the inhospitable Basil Fawlty, while Alison Pollard-Mansergh keeps shrieking "Basiiiiil!," imitating Prunella Scales as his harridan of a wife, Sybil.
Only Leigh Kelly as the Spanish waiter Manuel makes the part truly his own; he's quite loveable and pulls off all the physical comedy perfectly. (I kept hoping that along would come Polly, but alas, this is a three-actor affair.)
The words spoken by these three actors in Faulty Towers – the W changed to a U to evade copyright issues – are about a third pilfered from actual Fawlty Towers episodes (Communication Problems; Basil the Rat); the rest is in-character improvisation that leans heavily on repeated catchphrases.
It's only intermittently funny. Farce, of which Fawlty Towers is perhaps the purest of examples, requires tight structure and timing, of course. Take a sitcom, stretch it to three hours – and what do you expect?
The couple from Ajax, Ont., sitting next to me felt the show lived up to their expectations. "I hope this gets a good review – because that means we're having a good time," he said to me, upon discovering I was there as a critic, in what I found the smartest and funniest line of the evening. She gave it four stars at the end, he gave it three; I'm letting them have the star rating, splitting the difference, because I liked them and want them to have had a good time. I'm also doing it to punish all readers who don't actually read reviews past the top.
A critic could only like Faulty Towers as immersive performance art; and, indeed, I was impressed by the dedication to verisimilitude in the awfulness of the service. Sybil, hearing of my nut allergies, told me to stay away from Basil – a variation on a line I have heard from probably 100 unfunny waiters at this point in my life. (I was chastised for not laughing.) Later, as part of a bit of physical comedy, a tray of nuts was simply thrown over the diners; it's only because I alerted the publicist in advance that I avoided a shower of salty death. The writers and director of Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience, if they exist, have wisely not included their names in the program, so I cannot track them down and stab my EpiPen in their neck.
Faulty Towers: The Dining Experience continues to April 26 (sonycentre.ca).
J. Kelly Nestruck