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...

This review is from the original 2016 Menier Chocolate Factory run of The Truth. Lindsay Posner’s production is revived for a 2026 West End transfer starring Stephen Mangan, Ardal O’Hanlon, Sarah Hadland and Janie Dee. A new review will follow. This is the third play by the dazzling young French playwright Florian Zeller (‘The Father’, ‘The Mother’) to be staged in London in less than two years – and the third to be translated by British writer Christopher Hampton. It’s a zippy, witty farce about ever-shifting layers of infidelity as experienced by two middle-aged Parisian couples. The play’s laughs are as sharp as Lindsay Posner’s ruthlessly swift and snappy production (90 minutes, no interval). Its comedy is playful but also barbed: one of the characters even asks, ‘I want to know what kind of play we’re in. Is it a comedy? Or a tragedy?’We enter on a classic adultery set-up: Alice (Frances O’Connor, sleekly guarded) and Michel (Alexander Hanson, endearingly pompous), both well-turned-out professionals, are pulling up their pants mid-afternoon in a hotel room. It turns out that Michel is good friends with Alice’s husband, Paul (Robert Portal), and in turn Paul and Alice know Michel’s wife, Laurence (Tanya Franks). They’re urban sophisticates doing the dirty with a surface elan, and they're all intricately connected, just as in Harold Pinter’s landmark 1970s adultery drama ‘Betrayal’, a comparison that feels even more fitting when, as here, the play is performed in...