On one level, Antony Jay and Jonathan
Lynn's stage version of their classic 1980s BBC-TV comedy series has
bridged the quarter-century gap well. The world of politicians and
civil servants is now augmented by political advisers; topics include
global warming, financial crisis, control orders and the like, as well
as embracing a number of up-to-the-minute references to coalitions and
minority governments. Nor are the actors entirely eclipsed by their
predecessors. The series made stars of Paul Eddington as government
minister (and later PM) Jim Hacker and Nigel Hawthorne as senior civil
servant Sir Humphrey, often befuddling Hacker with polysyllabic
verbiage but sometimes outfoxed by him.
As Sir Humphrey here, Henry Goodman is not simply smooth; he is buffed
to a high sheen. If at moments he has the look more of a political
party financier than a Whitehall mandarin, his urbanity sets the
keynote even when he is for a moment or two not dominating events.
David Haig plays Hacker in his own style; the affected Churchillisms do
not work for him as they did for Eddington, his instinctive
bewildered-and-fraying tone being far more successful. As Bernard, the
principal private secretary caught between the two, Jonathan Slinger is
as engagingly honest here as he was magnetically duplicitous as the
RSC's Richard III.
What does not work, oddly, is the politics. The TV series flourished in
an era of stark ideological distinctions, in which Hacker was clearly a
Conservative. In 2010, ideology and presentation alike are nigh
indistinguishable as between parties, and targets are less likely to be
punctured by the darts of the script. Haig is not a natural Tory in
demeanour, and the situation often resembles the last beleaguered
months of Gordon Brown's premiership; however, issues such as climate
change, the BBC and Daily Mail, and above all the callous opportunism
with which criminality and immorality are considered as politically
expedient, are such universal political features that the material
paradoxically feels less powerful for its lack of party specificity. It
is as if the Tory Jay (conspicuously knighted by Thatcher) and the
socialist Lynn (who directs this production) had drafted a dramatic
coalition agreement, permitting a quota of jibes at the
bêtes noires of each, only to
find themselves as a result in the soggy centre ground.
[FOOTNOTE: A subsequent letter
to the FT from Jonathan Lynn
denied that he had ever been a socialist. Can't think where I
picked that idea up; perhaps I'd read somewhere that he was to the left
of Jay and over the years that datum became over-interpreted until it
popped out like this. Anyway, I'm wrong, but the error is
preserved here.]
Written for the Financial
Times.