There’s an illuminating anecdote in Ben Elton’s autobiography What Have I Done? about Elton chatting to former PM Jim Callaghan at a Downing Street Party in the 1990s. A waiter comes along and asks the 1970s PM to budge up because he is blocking a door. Elton notes that this is the way of the world. Even if you’ve had the top job you eventually just get in the way of waiters. It happens to all of us.
A similar moment occurs in I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, which features another ex-leader called Jim, Jim Hacker, played by Griff Rhys Jones. Hacker is now pushing 80, master of an Oxford college but in danger of losing that post as well as his home. “I used to have my finger on the nuclear button,” he says ruefully.
This revisiting of the BBC sitcom character first famously played by Paul Eddington is once again written by Jonathan Lynn and it brings him up to date with Hacker facing cancellation due to saying something un-woke. Could everything come crashing down? He calls on his old wingman, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Clive Francis) for help and together they try to hatch a plan to save their own cushy twilight years.
Hacker is not entirely alone. He now has a care worker Sophie, played with youthful gusto by Stephanie Levi-John, to help him get his socks on and make tea. She is repeatedly called a sex worker, one of the thinner jokes is a funny/corny script that has plenty of stronger laughs. Sophie represents the modern world, a bright Oxford student from a working class background saddled with debt.
But the show is dominated by the Rhys Jones/Francis double act. They’ve got good chemistry, bouncing lines off each other. Francis smoothly delivers a couple of Appleby’s trademark word salads but also like to indulge in unexpected physical comedy, jiggling his legs about before retrieving his phone, climbing over the sofa or messing with the stairlift (the set is a beautiful book-lined room).
Rhys Jones is eminently watchable if a little too spritely for someone ten years older than his actual age. Lynn’s script slightly sags towards the end when it gets more serious, but to its credit it is never maudlin or nostalgic. Lynn is even handed, seeing the good in both the young and the old.
If you are the kind of person that laughs at someone who gets the Baltic and the Balkans muddled and doesn’t know that Yugoslavia no longer exists, then you are definitely in the I’m Sorry, Prime Minister demographic. Younger, more geo-politically informed theatre fans should also enjoy it though as a tasty slice of traditional throwback stage comedy. There’s no need to tell these characters to budge out of the way just yet.
Until May 9 and touring. Details here.
Picture: Johan Persson
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