Apollo Theatre

Jim Hacker is finding negotiating old age as baffling as government in this follow up by writer-director Jonathan Lynn to 2010’s Yes, Prime Minister – a stage rendition of the seminal Westminster-set TV satire he co-wrote with Antony Jay. Ex-prime minister Hacker (Griff Rhys Jones), now in his eighties, is master of an Oxford College which he bankrolled and bears his name. We meet him hiring – and immediately clashing with – Black, working-class care worker and Oxford graduate Sophie (Stephanie Levi-John). He’s facing attempts by the college populace to oust him after a series of idiotic remarks. So, of course, he turns to his former permanent secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby (Clive Francis) for assistance. If the TV series, its sequel Yes, Prime Minister and Lynn’s previous play took aim at the state of British politics, that feels more like window dressing here. Yes, there are some funny takedowns of Brexit and the crassly self-serving nature of the modern political class, but these don’t feel hugely new. Instead, where the play works best is the elegiac tone it strikes. Beneath the wit is a warning: be careful of reaping what you’ve sown. Hacker and Humphrey are still monstrous in their own quippy way – respectively buffoonish and manipulative, they are privileged political dinosaurs of an extinct era. But they are also old men who have fallen foul of the system they helped to create, friendless and family-less. We learn that Humphrey has been shunted into an institution...