Review: I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, Apollo Theatre ★★★

An enjoyable trip down Memory Lane For fans of the ORIGINAL show

There is something deeply comforting about settling into the Apollo Theatre for an evening with Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey Appleby. Like finding a well-worn paperback on a childhood shelf, I’m Sorry, Prime Minister, the long-awaited stage sequel from BAFTA Award-winning co-creator Jonathan Lynn, wraps around you with the warmth of a very well loved peak of British television comedy.

Griff Rhys Jones‘ Hacker remains affably, endearingly dim, while Clive Francis‘ Sir Humphrey loses none of his arrogant, bureaucratic grandeur. The central relationship, pompous civil servant steering hapless politician through the undergrowth of power, still shines with a clarity that four decades cannot dim. Seeing them past their careers and their prime, rather than at the height of their powers, is a shrewd modernising choice: these are men the world has quietly outpaced, and the comedy of that is rich.

The humour is there in abundance, and crucially it has not been dumbed down. Brexit, the Cecil Rhodes statue debate, the role of the House of Lords, and a genuinely thorny curriculum argument about the n-word and the important black writers who used it all find their way into the double-speak. The misunderstandings with the modern world are largely done well, giving the production a relevance that feels earned rather than forced, whether the source of confusion is working class sensibilities, LGBTQ+ representation, or the cancel culture engulfing Hacker College.

The set is a delight: the house of an upper-middle-class Oxford don rendered in dainty tea cups balanced on towering piles of books and papers. Physical comedy involving a pouffe and a stairlift lands with the audience in exactly the way it should, the laughter easy and generous.

The long Humphrey monologues, those magnificent cascading walls of obfuscatory prose, are the absolute joy of the evening. The crowd gave themselves to them completely.

If the production occasionally loses the thread, and there are moments where the pace slackens when it should coil, these feel like the gentle frustrations of reunion rather than fundamental failings. This is not theatre straining to be something new. It is theatre comfortable in its own very well-tailored skin, made for an audience who grew up with these characters and want one last glorious round of red tape.

But it is the finale that lingers longest. As the curtain calls begin, enormous portraits of the original television cast, Paul Eddington, Nigel Hawthorne, Derek Fowlds, and writers Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn descend slowly from above. The stage actors turn and bow to them. The original theme tune plays.

In that moment, something shifts. This is no longer simply a stage sequel; it is an act of loving tribute, a company acknowledging that they stand in very long shadows and are glad of it. The audience, many of whom have carried these characters since childhood, felt it. More than a few were visibly moved.

Warm, witty, and generous of spirit. Like hot chocolate on a Sunday evening, not challenging, not revelatory, but in that final moment, unexpectedly tender.