It’s common for actors to moonlight as waiters. It’s sometimes the only way to get by in an industry where full-time work is a luxury and finding it requires some daytime flexibility.
Once a performer gets that career-making, rent-paying, long-term gig, most cross their fingers and hope for an end to waiting tables.
It didn’t quite work out that way for actor Anthony Sottile. He’s in the enviable position of working in a show that has employed him for four years and toured the world, yet he’s still required to serve dinner every night. Happily, he doesn’t have to take the waitering too seriously. The more incompetent he is, the better the customers like it.
Sottile plays the role of Manuel, the hapless Spanish waiter in the immersive theatre-dining experience Faulty Towers. “Actually, a lot of it is me being chased around the room,” Sottile says. “Sometimes I’m performing around the tables, sometimes underneath, sometimes on top.”
Sottile is part of the three-person team bringing the uniquely chaotic dining room ambience of the classic BBC sitcom Fawlty Towers to life in the Sydney Opera House’s Utzon Room. The show includes a set-menu meal with the actors performing around the diners.
“The audience don’t just sit and watch,” Sottile explains. “They participate as much as they want to and we include them as much as we can.”
Faulty Towers doesn’t re-enact scenes from the original TV series – it pays loving homage, says Sottile. “Our script is completely original but, of course, the audience expects certain things to happen or certain catch phrases, like Manuel’s ‘I know nothing’. You can literally see them hanging at the edge of their seats because they just want you to say it.”
The idea for the show dates back to the early 1990s, says its co-deviser, Alison Pollard-Mansergh, who also plays Sybil. “I was in a troupe of performers in New Zealand and doing corporate work and we did a lot of Fawlty Towers-themed nights with me as Sybil. When I moved to Australia I couldn’t get any work as an actor because of my atrocious Kiwi accent so my husband and I got some actors and improvisers together and we started doing Faulty Towers in 1997.
“It developed completely organically and now I find I’ve been playing Sybil on and off for about 22 years.”
Based in Brisbane, Pollard-Mansergh’s Interactive Theatre International is a global affair with eight teams of actors creating the Faulty Towers Dining Experience in Britain, Europe and Scandinavia, Asia and Australia. Germans “just love it”, she says.
Like the sitcom that spawned it, the show is a success because its humour is grounded in reality. “John Cleese and [co-writer] Connie Booth based these characters on real people and the things that happen in hotels – like people dying,” Pollard-Mansergh says. “Anyone who has worked in a service industry will tell you it’s basically all true.”
There are three scripted scenes in Faulty Towers and the rest are in the lap of the gods, says Pollard-Mansergh. “We improvise, we interact with the audience and it’s not clear to them what is scripted and what isn’t. Often we get people who endow themselves as the Major, or as a German, or as a health inspector, and we play with those people. It’s a very elastic script and it utilises all your skills as an actor.”
It falls to actor Jordan Edmeades to recreate the immortal role of Basil. “Physically speaking, it’s been a four-year journey and I’m still learning Basil,” says Edmeades, who is 198 centimetres tall. “Before every show I’ll watch an episode just to zoom in on his body language, but these days I’ve got it to a point where the boxes are ticked and people just accept me.”
Edmeades says he creates stories around each table in each show – intimate moments that build in intensity through the night. “Everybody has an opportunity to complain and make Basil more irate. It’s lovely to improvise like that. You are actually doing something – managing a real dining room. It’s not pretending. You’re not a comedian just delivering a joke. You are being real.”
Faulty Towers – The Dining Experience plays at the Sydney Opera House, June 27 to July 4. Tickets (includes three-course meal) $145 to $195, 9250 7777.
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