Review: Yes, Prime Minister – Theatre Royal, Newcastle
Yes, Prime Minister
Watching episodes of Yes, Minister and its successor, Yes, Prime Minister, from my shiny DVD box-set, it’s incredibly hard to believe that it’s been twenty-two years since Jim Hacker had his finger on the nuclear button whilst his Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby had a firm grasp of all his master’s strings. Amazingly for a sitcom set in its present day of the 1980’s, Yes, Minister only ever shows signs of its age if you look too closely at the telephones, cars and spectacles. Its themes and plots of political wrangling, out-manoeuvring and backstabbing can still be readily applied to today’s politics, as can a surprising amount of jibes, with a routine about why the Chancellor and Prime Minister would never trust each other proving particularly relevant a few short years ago.
The series’ knowledge of the internal workings of both Westminster and Whitehall added extra weight and knowledge by the fact that a lot of the series’ plots were based on anecdotes shared with writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn by real politicians and civil servants; but in the twenty plus years since the show ended, the undeniable truth is that the key areas of politics which the show focused on have changed considerably.
The main difference is in personality politics; Jim Hacker always cared far too much about what people thought of him, but while he had Sir Humphrey stage managing events and saving the government’s face on a whole, today’s MPs and parties have personal PR spin doctors, whose dedication to personal image is shown in the brilliant, The Thick Of It, and who have arguably taken the place of the Civil Servants.
So then, in the age of Communications Chiefs and Malcolm Tucker, the big question is can Yes, Prime Minister, and Sir Humphrey, still prove itself to be relevant?
These were my main concerns when heading out to see Yes, Prime Minister, after all it’s one thing to sit down with some DVDs and enjoy a classic, it’s another thing entirely to see a modern day revival with different actors trying to fill iconic shoes. It has to be said though that the best move that Jay and Lynn could have possibly made when resurrecting their finest creations is to have them transported from the small screen and onto the stage, with theatrical conventions and a longer running time giving the plot a real opportunity to breathe and expand whilst plunging the characters into an ever-deepening spiral of misery.
More on that in a minute though, as it’s hard not to imagine that the question on most people’s lips is whether or not the two leads, Richard McCabe and Simon Williams, can fill Paul Eddington and Nigel Hawthorne’s size tens. In all honesty the spectre of those two towering performances, mixed with a nervous anticipation, hangs over the first ten minutes or so. This isn’t down to the performers, who have been doing the show for long enough now to know what they’re doing and be comfortable with their roles, more a feeling from the audience (or possibly just me, after all its hard to imagine Blackadder without Atkinson and Robinson, or Red Dwarf without Charles and Barry). Everyone settles down soon enough though, as Williamsclearly moulds his Humphrey in Nigel Hawthorne’s image, with some of the same speech patterns and inflections making his performance more of a nod to the past than a Hawthorne impression. McCabe’s Hacker retains his namesake’s shaky confidence and grasp of the situation and paranoia fuelled persecution complex, but he doesn’t seem quite as stable, doesn’t cope with the pressures of the job as well, seems to drink a lot more, and is certainly a lot more scheming; not quite as ready to let Humphrey get away with his machinations. Add to these two confident and nuanced performances a version of Principal Private Secretary Bernard Wooley (Chris Larkin) taken to a panicky extreme, and a new special advisor in the form of Charlotte Lewis’ down to earth Claire Sutton, and on the character front Yes, Prime Minister manages to create a satisfying mix of the new and the familiar.
The same basic ethos applies itself well as a description of the plot, with the first act serving as a wordy introduction to the problems that Hacker is facing during a stay at Chequers, and feeling a lot more like the TV show as result. Act two is where this new show really excels, though, with the steadily growing mountain of problems falling one after another onto the beleaguered Prime Minister’s head, with only the arch-schemer Sir Humphrey providing any hope of getting the Prime Minister out of trouble and the bottom of his whiskey bottle. There are several brilliant set pieces which I’m loathe to spoil for anyone who is yet to see the show, but as the second half of the show draws more and more on the standard theatrical conventions of farce, the funnier it becomes, and the better the performances get.
Yes, Prime Minister, then, is quite an achievement; an updated and (slightly) re-imagined resurrection of a classic that manages to thrive on its own merits as well as that of its source material, and one that doesn’t rely on prior knowledge to be both funny and genuinely unmissable.
