Here we have a baggy, old-fashioned stage finale to a 46-year-old political sitcom that amuses despite the misplaced star casting of Griff Rhys Jones in the role of ex-Prime Minister Jim Hacker. Always untroubled by subtlety, the comedian’s constant mugging and whinnying, guffawing, meandering delivery of every single line here stand in stark contrast to the sharp timing and comic physical precision of Clive Francis as Hacker’s sparring partner, former cabinet secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby.
Now in their 80s, the two characters find themselves in a baffling new world of cancel culture, safe spaces and trigger warnings. Hacker (“I’m not dead, I’m in the house of Lords”) faces ousting from the Oxford college he founded due to his politically incorrect views. Sir Humphrey has been fleeced and briefly incarcerated in a “home for the elderly deranged” by a wicked daughter-in-law.
Jonathan Lynn’s script is as much about the loss of agency, influence and company in old age as it is about making fun of political old farts and the sensitivities of the young. Lynn, who also directs, is 82 and has outlived his co-writer Antony Jay and the stars whose chemistry helped to make the original show a hit, Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne. If this swansong is slapdash and indulgent, he’s surely earned the right to it.
We first see Hacker interviewing a prospective care worker to help him dress, shower, and deal with the occasional lavatorial accident. Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John) is black, gay, and an impoverished former literature student at Hacker’s college - basically the human equivalent of a set of garden rakes for him to step on. Her annoying habit of quoting from books, poems and Shakespeare (including a piece of “queer literature” from the Bible) highlights the ignorance of a man who doesn’t know James Baldwin from Clare Balding.
In the sitcom, Hacker’s vanity was tempered by the creeping suspicion he was overpromoted and out of his depth. Here, he’s just a deluded idiot. It’s highly unlikely he’d call for help on a man who despised, manipulated and managed him throughout his political career, unless you take into account that he has no one else. His wife has died and his daughter is estranged. “Don’t you have any friends?” Sophie asks. “No, I was in politics,” he answers.
Anyway, once the two men have been engineered into the same room – the chaotic master’s house of the college, complete with stairlift and Churchill bust - we get an agreeable rehash of the old dynamic: Hacker’s hubris meeting Humphrey’s silky condescension. “I’m glad you think so,” is the latter’s stock response to each boast from the former.
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Francis delivers a couple of Appleby’s scrolling, polysyllabic speeches, designed to bamboozle Hacker, as set pieces. He also has a splendid bit of comic business when an alarming spasm in his leg turns out to be a vibrating mobile phone. And did I mention his timing and delivery? Sophie asks if Hacker was a “thinker or a leader” as PM. “No,” he annihilatingly replies.
But we also get lengthy to-and-fros about Brexit, free speech and the politics of statues. The original TV series kindled in the embers of James Callahan’s Labour government but its depiction of the war between capable civil servants and incompetent, impulsive politicians applied equally to the Thatcher years. Today that conflict is still ongoing and better understood, but for all the bandying-about of hot-button issues, the politics feel strangely unrooted in time.
On the plus side, Lynn is brave (or old and therefore zero-f*ck-giving) enough to make jokes about dementia, incontinence and loneliness, issues that don’t just loom for political leaders and Whitehall mandarins, but which rarely get talked about on stage. And he knows how to write a set-up and a punchline. Levi-John and William Chubb, as Hacker’s nemesis from the college authorities, make the best of underwritten characters. Francis is a joy to watch. And Rhys Jones? I’m sorry, Prime Minister…
I’m Sorry Prime Minister at the Apollo Theatre, until May 9, tickets available here
