“THE tendrils of the past often intertwine into the fabric of the present,” John Cleese writes of his foray into adapting the immortal TV series “Fawlty Towers” for the stage.

And therein lies the problem. For without doubt, what the enthusiastic audience at Saturday’s world premiere night in Sydney wanted was an exact replica of what they’d seen over the years from 1975, on the screen.

The wild applause that greeted each favourite character on entrance was a clear indication that the past was more in their minds than the present, and for the hapless 2016 cast, the closer they came to the originals the better, no matter how much Cleese might assert that they weren’t expected to copy.

Copy they did, mostly with great expertise, Stephen Hall as Basin was lithe, athletic and apoplectic as Basil, Blazey Best, cast against type  as Sybil was dressed as a lookalike but proved much more brusque and terrifying that Prunella Scales ever was, Syd Brisbane laid it on with a trowel as Manuel, Paul Bertram huffed and puffed effectively as the Major and Deborah Kennedy was truly irritating as the deaf Mrs Richards.

Perhaps the closest to the old cast was Aimee Horne as Polly, who was originally played by Cleese’s co-writer Connie Booth.

The script covers Cleese’s three favourite half-hour episodes of the 12, (“Communication Problems”, “Basil and The Rat” and “The Germans”) which were,  on the advice of British theatre director Caroline Jay Ranger, all brought together in one huge and silly finale.

Familiar these were to the audience, but unlike the stage version of “Allo Allo”, which just focused on “The Fallen Madonna with the Big Boobies”, they did not make for an effective plot.

Pluses were the elaborate design by Liz Ascroft that successfully captured the feel of both a 1975 TV studio lot and the seaside hotel. The tight drilling, the timing and imaginatively choreographed sequences too, some under the eye of the resident director, former Canberran Ed Wightman, paid off.

And yet, despite the joy of familiarity, or especially in the slightly altered gags for the German sequence maybe because of it, the laughs didn’t come thick and fast. It’s a dangerous gamble to play with the idiom of one genre (TV) and transfer it to another (stage).

One can only wish this ambitious  production the very best of British-Australian luck.