Credit where credit is due, with respect to the cast of Faulty Towers The Dining Experience: it’s tough to stage any kind of show in a live restaurant setting, let alone a comedy show with an emphasis on slapstick. It’s a unique mode of performance and offers a spectacle that few other festival shows could ever hope to match. However, the contentious elements of Faulty Towers The Dining Experience stack up to ultimately outweigh the positives.
Naturally, a great deal of effort is required to keep diners entertained and to keep things ticking over between courses. But these segments generally prove far from punchy – instead, some are played with surprising dramatic poise. There are occasions in which the show moves at a glacial pace, the performers simply glaring at each other, soaking in silence. Unusually for a comedy show, it’s often found infused with a strange tension. It’s as if lines reside just out of the cast members’ cognitive reach, inadvertently forcing a weird vibe upon proceedings.
These moments bog the whole show down and force the cast to work hard to restore momentum. They struggle to claw it back, too. While the cast members attempt to capture the madcap revelry of some of the show’s greatest moments, their urgency isn’t always apparent. Considering the characters are constantly on rotation and at least one seems to be missing at any given time, you would think their energy would be explosive for the entire duration of the show. Alas, their shenanigans are underwhelming and the sense that things are truly shambolic never really manifests.
Meanwhile, the fact that the show revolves almost exclusively around intimation is a little underwhelming. So much of the show involves memorable scenes from the original series simply being regurgitated, without any obvious creative flair. Combined, the characters of Basil, Sybil and Manuel offer one hell of a blueprint and it seems crazy that the people behind Faulty Towers The Dining Experience aren’t bothering to put it to good use. As it is, Faulty Towers The Dining Experience is an unimaginative cover version of a classic show.
Sustained success since the show’s debut in 1997 would suggest that Faulty Towers The Dining Experience is only guilty of delivering exactly what people want. INevertheless, there’s no shaking the notion that it could be so much more.
BY NICK MASON
