If the international critics labelled Faulty Towers as “a two-hour eat, drink and laugh sensation” they couldn’t be more right. Faulty Towers The Dining Experience in their second run at the Maitland State Room of Mount Lavinia Hotel left the diners each day wanting more of their chaotic dialogue, actions and situations, brought out unsuppressed laughter which no doubt the diners carried to their homes, every night.
Ever since 2009 Faulty Towers The Dining Experience has played to crowded houses not only in Melbourne and other parts of Australia, but also in the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Europe. It takes a lot of courage for the threesome – Basil, Sybil and Manuel – to be quick in repartee and create impromptu situations which displayed their skill in pulling off laughter, so much so that they have now become known as the best “Fawlty Towers” impersonators in the world.
John Cleese created the characters for the cult-status television series “Fawlty Towers” and as a point of interest it must be mentioned that the BBC Transcription Service recorded the dialogue with complete sound effects and sent it over to the English Service of the SLBC for broadcast. The program, half an hour in duration was broadcast every Sunday at 11 a.m. in the series Serial Time. It was a high point on a Sunday morning as presenters from the Sinhala, Tamil and Hindi Services plus recording engineers who were on duty made it a point to be in the English Service studio at that time to follow the dialogue and enjoy the wit and the resultant chaos!!
At the Mount Lavinia Hotel performances, Karen Hamilton played the role of the domineering wife Sybil, Geoffrey Reczek the hopeless language challenged waiter Manuel with Rob Langston as the snobbish and manic Basil Faulty husband of Sybil.
Farcical situations never fail to bring on laughter and this mayhem dinner service had many. The butter sachets thrown on the tables with gay abandon, the dinner rolls that followed suit never reached the side platters, but found a place on the centre of the table. Somebody’s soup revealed a denture in it and Manuel choosing this moment in the service to hop on to a table to sing his anthem Viva Espana. Fortunately, a steward of the hotel was quick enough to save a guest from getting drenched with his rightful potion of soup! The dialogue between Basil, Sybil and Manuel humorous in its contradictions and its situations, ran through till the end of the show!
In short it was an evening of fun and laughter.