I’m Sorry, Prime Minister in the West End – review

There are some interesting themes bubbling away in this – apparently – final outing for Yes, Minister characters Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby, which started life at the enterprising Barn Theatre in Cirencester. Elderly care, inheritance tax and cancel culture are foremost among them, but centrally, it feels like an elongated howl against the dying of the light.

“I used to be Prime Minister,” Griff Rhys Jones‘ ailing 80-something Hacker, reliant on a walking stick and stairlift, exclaims repeatedly. He’s holed up in an Oxford college bearing his name, where the students are demanding his resignation as Master for making a joke about women’s lingerie. Who’s he going to call to try to bail him out of the mess? Naturally, it’s his erstwhile civil service sidekick Sir Humphrey (Clive Francis), who’s in need of some help himself, having been fleeced by his son and daughter-in-law.

Joining them is Hacker’s newly appointed care worker Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John), a Black, gay, working-class graduate of the college with a special interest in queer literature. Cue no end of predictable cross-generational badinage, as Hacker and Sir Humphrey take issue with trigger warnings on canonical books, while Sophie finds little sympathy with their money moans when she’s cleaning pants for minimum wage.

There are, as one would expect from original series writer Jonathan Lynn (his writing partner Antony Jay died in 2016), a smattering of decent bon mots – “If there is a God, why does he run the world like the home office?” asks Hacker during a debate on religion – and some well-worked physical comedy, including an excellent gag involving a vibrating phone. But much of it comes over like an extended and clumsy attempt to work through a list of hot-button issues, several of them now behind the times (Sir Humphrey’s characteristically protracted assessment of Brexit among them).

The plot, such as it is, barely develops over the near two-and-a-half-hour running time, and Lynn’s own production, played out on Lee Newby’s detailed book-lined set, lacks the necessary dynamism to compensate. It’s a shame he seems so preoccupied with airing grievances about the wokerati, when he should be letting his much-loved characters do what they do best: making us laugh. There’s also a serious question of credibility around the idea that an apparently unpopular former Prime Minister could establish an Oxford college in his name; one of the joys of the original series was the feeling that it was rooted so firmly in reality (an approach later brought to its apotheosis by The Thick of It).

The cast, which also includes William Chubb as a college mandarin, work hard nevertheless, with Francis shining particularly brightly as Sir Humphrey with the gloves off (he’s dropped the p’s and q’s since retirement). But they’re fighting an uphill battle with material that feels more of a disappointing coda than a fond farewell.