I'M SORRY PRIME MINISTER, I CAN’T QUITE REMEMBER - at the ARTS
Yes Minister and its glorious sequel Yes Prime Minister were the comedy creations of Jonathan Lynn and Douglas Jay. They rollicked through the early eighties and they’ve been going in repeats ever since -in the sophisticated lavatories of The Hoste Arms in Burnham Market, they’re on a loop. Jim Hacker the hapless Prime Minister and his all manipulative obsequious master Sir Humphrey Appleton ran Whitehall and British politics like a game of cat and mouse. Or as Jim Hacker confesses this in this evening’s revisitation of their relationship, like a snake and a mongoose. Sir Humphrey, Head of the Civil Service always came out on top but invariably convinced dim Jim the solution was all his idea.
Last night Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey were back in full force. But in a subtly written script by Jonathan Lynn himself they’re no longer in power and both have hit very hard times indeed. On the surface of it, all appears well for the ageing PM. The set of the play is quite astonishingly brilliant - sunshine beams into an elegant room, actually the Master’s Lodge at Hacker College, Oxford (Jim persuaded a Russian oligarch to endow the place with a generous donation ). But things are doing horribly wrong. Instead of the comfortable life after eighty he had hoped for (indeed engineered with a scorcher clause to ensure he could carry on in post even after the retirement limit of 75) the students are baying for his blood and send an emissary, a high Court Judge, as the customary august Visitor, Sir David Knell - played with sonorous authority by Andy Hawthorne, to inform poor Jim his time is up. Sir David’s sudden appearance, mistaken for The Grim Reaper, is one of the many comic capers in this deeply humorous production.
Michaela Bennison plays Sophie, the newly appointed care worker for Jim - it’s care worker not carer she protests “like Sex worker?’ he enquires. Sophie’s brilliant lines delivered with wonderful musicality stud the script with gorgeous quotations from the English Literature canon (she studied at Hacker College) but now feels resentment she has a burdensome debt and a. lowly job. Her interventions make her the magical mistress of events in the Master’s Lodge and indeed she closes the play with her own Shakespearean style solution.
JIm Hacker and Sir Humphrey meet up again after decades apart
We all loved Clive Francis as the scholarly disillusioned Sir Humphrey. His breathtakingly verbose perorations around the classical interpretations of political philosophy were so exquisitely delivered, the audience burst into spontaneous applause in appreciation of these blasts of erudition, although at one point even Sir Humphrey has to admit he’s lost his thread. And Christopher Bianchi is a consummate hang-dog gloom meister as Jim Hacker. Hard to love, but not irredeemable - with the help of a good woman.
A great evening at the theatre, the script is a joy, the actors brilliant. After all these years we still want to hear those two men spar - and of course the final words of every episode, a weary
“Yes Prime Minister”.
Btw the set is a star in this production. Without the fabulous falling snow outside - so realistic - the airy rooms and lovely view beyond the action might have been too claustrophobic, thank you Genius Lee Newby.
