Political satire is alive and well in I’m Sorry Prime Minister at Cambridge Arts Theatre. Jonathan Lynn’s final chapter in the Yes Minister saga is packed with razor-sharp wit, brilliant performances and plenty of timely laughs. ANGELA SINGER was there for CambsNews
It’s not where you start, it’s where you finish. Former Prime Minister Jim Hacker is sitting comfortably as master of an Oxford College until he is suddenly asked to leave – with nowhere else to go.
Sir Humphrey is equally unfortunate. His evil daughter-in-law has consigned him to St Dymphna’s Home for the Elderly Deranged. He’s escaped from there but she’s taken all his funds.
But the two old codgers still have some cards up their fraying sleeves. They can conspire together and they have the help of Hacker’s careworker Sophie. She has a first class degree in English – from Oxford. Surely things will somehow work out.
I’m Sorry Prime Minister is deep in the tradition of the beloved Yes Minister television series. It is a witty as ever, written like all the others by Jonathan Lynn. He created this final episode as a stage play in 2016 as a memorial to his co-writer Antony Jay, the year Jay died.
This current version, a decade on, has been neatly updated with modern references and is as razor sharp as ever.
All four in the cast have precision comic timing and superb delivery: Clive Francis as Sir Humphrey; Simon Rouse as Jim Hacker, Princess Donnough as Sophie – and William Chubb as Sir David – the Oxford academic who arrives looking like the Grim Reaper to tell Hacker his time at the Oxford College is up. He is going to be evicted from his grace and favour home.
There are some great lines in this play: “If there is a God why does he run the world like the Home Office?”
While discussing the strength of Hacker’s tenure at Hacker College, the Oxford college he has persuaded a benefactor to found, the debate between the four characters includes wokeness, (what it is) the British Empire (how misguided it is to say anything good about it), mentioning particular words, even in a literary context, make any jokes at all about women’s underwear and the boxes you need to tick to get an academic job these days.
The 1970s television sitcom, which began as Yes Minister and developed into Yes Prime Minister when Jim Hacker rose up the greasy pole, is still being repeated. It starred Paul Eddington as Hacker with Nigel Hawthorne and Derek Fowlds as the top civil servants who would usually outwit him, persuading him that whatever radical policy he wanted to pursue was “unwise Minister”.
Jonathan Lynn remembers that in 1976, fifty years ago, his friend Antony Jay suggested they write a comedy series about the Civil Service.
Jay, as well as being head of the BBC Television team that had made the groundbreaking 1960s political satires That Was the Week that Was and The Frost Report had been a political advisor to the Thatcher Government. He wrote speeches for deputy prime minister, Geoffrey Howe.
Lynn remembers how politicians were remarkably frank in those days. “We found that the higher politicians had risen, the more indiscreet they became. A bottle or two of good claret with lunch and they would tell you anything.”
Well thank goodness for that. The final chapter of Yes Minister is as incisive and as funny as ever.
I’m Sorry Prime Minister is at Cambridge Arts Theatre until Saturday, May 23.
