Some Sir Humphreys of the public sector earn more than the Prime Minister, but David Cameron has the power to cut their numbers, their remit and their final salary pension plans. The current face-off between public servants and their political masters hovers over Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s updated stage version of their much-loved TV satire – and Jim Hacker, reincarnated as a coalition PM, wins every round.
It is a pleasure to see Hacker and Humphrey at it again, even though this two-and-a-half-hour wrestling match strains the story of their rivalry (so well suited to episode-length bouts) and stretches the jokes and indeed credulity to its limits. Many initial topical references seem crowbarred into the script, so that even the wonderfully fluent actors can’t disguise the signs of forced entry.
Jonathan Lynn’s production is extremely well cast: in particular, Jonathan Slinger brings Hacker’s browbeaten PPS Bernard right into the foreground, making him a hugely funny pinstriped caricature of prim cowardice, as well the closest thing to a moral compass available in this book-lined world of Latin-quoting mini-Machiavellis. Henry Goodman’s beleagured Sir Humphrey lacks the plump, feline assurance of the original, but has a notable talent for delivering long filibustering speeches which mean precisely nothing. And perhaps it’s inevitable that, on stage, the rivals try to out-perform each other instead of sidling around in a subtle dance.
David Haig makes Hacker a bluff opportunist for our times. His genius as an actor is 99 per cent perspiration: quite literally, he acts with his gushing pores. In a former West End role he managed to sweat like a murderous alien-fixated draper, so perspiring like a PM about to fly an underage prostitute to Chequers in the royal helicopter is no sweat at all.
It’s the whiff of nastiness in this subplot that prevents this evening being mere nostalgia. But despite its topicality, it never quite masters the post-spin, post- ‘The Thick of It’, intensely mediated political culture in which today’s smoothest operators sink or swim.