Fawlty Towers – The Play is the best museum piece you’ll ever see

Fawlty Towers at the Apollo may be the best museum piece you’ll ever see. A full-length play has been carved out of three episodes: ‘The Hotel Inspectors’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘Communication Problems’ in which the deaf guest, Mrs Richards, made a nuisance of herself by refusing to switch on her hearing aid in case the batteries ran out. For anyone who saw the sitcom in the 1970s, this is a pleasantly weird show. It’s like returning to a seaside funfair after half a century and finding all the rides unchanged and the staff more or less as you remember them.

Paul Nicholas makes an even better Major than the Major. And his rich, fruity voice is an unexpected treat. Manuel is played by Hemi Yeroham, who hadn’t seen the show before he landed the role. He adds a few personal touches that work very well and he’s at least as likeable as Andrew Sachs – plus, he’s better looking. Anna-Jane Casey (Sybil) gets a round of applause just for walking on stage with her famous bee-hive hairdo. Her domineering spikiness comes across brilliantly. And Adam Jackson-Smith delivers the most precise and carefully studied facsimile of Basil. Actors hate being told this but by adding nothing new he gets it exactly right. His only failure is the goose-stepping Hitler routine, which is beyond him physically because he lacks the height for it and can’t flex his limbs with Basil’s crazed athleticism. But who could? Cleese’s record as the best Hitler impersonator in history remains unchallenged.

The show’s ending doesn’t quite work, as Cleese is doubtless aware. The problem is that an episodic TV show is a different beast from a one-off drama. A sitcom usually ends with an enjoyable flourish that leaves the basic set-up unaltered.