Apollo Theatre

This review is from 2024. ‘Fawlty Towers’ regularly tops polls of the best British TV comedies of all time. But in recent years, its co-creator and star John Cleese has become a lightning rod for criticism for his proclamations that so-called ‘wokeness’ is killing comedy. So, how does his stage version of hapless hotel owner Basil Fawlty – arriving ahead of his TV remake of the series with his daughter – fare in the ‘funny’ stakes? From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design – encompassing the titular Torquay hotel’s reception, dining room and an upstairs guest room – to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production leans so heavily on nostalgia, it’s amazing that it doesn’t crash through the stage. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows that live partly in people’s rose-tinted memories into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. As Basil (Adam Jackson-Smith) attempts to evade Sybil’s watchful gaze while dealing with barely concealed contempt with the hotel’s guests, we get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons. Theatre legend Paul Nicholas engagingly reanimates the absent-minded Major, Kate Russell-Smith and Nicola Sanderson wander in like extras from ‘Miss Marple’ as Miss Tibbs and Miss Gatsby and Hemi Yeroham gamely hams it up as the English-mangling Spanish waiter Manuel. As Basil, Jackson-Smith has the piano-string tautness of...

Birmingham Stage Company’s theatrical versions of Terry Deary’s lurid history books have now been kicking around for 20 years now, and as a celebration they’ve cobbled together a new Barmy Britain show that’s a compliation of the best bits of all the many, many other Barmy Britain shows. Expect a barrage of lurid facts on everyone from Boudica to Burke and Hare.  For ages five plus.

This review is from the Young Vic, March 2025. Punch will transfer to the West End in autumn 2025 with the same cast. Absurdly prolific as he is, it sometimes feels like we could do with cloning playwright James Graham a few times. His reassuringly familiar but diverse body of work has done so much to bring obscure chapters of recent history to life – from the whipping operation of the hung 1970s Labour parliament to the 1968 television clashes between Gore Vidal and William F Buckley Jr – that it feels faintly bleak pondering the great stories that one James Graham alone has to let slide.  Punch, which originated at the Nottingham Playhouse last year, is the perfect example of what he does. It tells the poignant story of Jacob (David Shields), a lad from Nottingham who got into a totally pointless fight – if you can even call it that – with James, a (never-seen) paramedic just a few years older than him. On a big night out, Jacob punched James precisely once. James went down, and a couple of weeks later he died, his life support switched off following a bleed to the brain. Graham’s script delves into this with typical deftness: arguably his plays all amount to really, really good explainers. We get the incident and also its profoundly complicated aftermath. But we also get a forensic dive into Jacob’s life, his journey from a sweet primary schooler who loves his single mum to his gradual falling in with the wrong crowd, as undiagnosed neurological conditions and the...