Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s Yes, Prime Minister seems designed to cause offence to as big a group of potential offendees as possible. While largely immune to outrage myself, I nevertheless felt considerable sympathy for all present at the Playhouse on Monday who were being expected to laugh at what they ought never for a moment to consider even vaguely funny.

Pre-eminent in this respect is the play’s central ‘joke’, concerning the demand of an Eastern European foreign minister for sex with an underage girl, without which he will not be signing an oil pipe deal lucrative to Britain.

The demand is an absolute no-no to the Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Graham Seed) until it dawns on him that it needn’t be a British schoolgirl. A suitable candidate for ravishment is on hand in the shape of the daughter of Chequers’s new cook, an illegal immigrant.

His tough-as-nails special policy advisor Claire Sutton (Polly Maberly) also recognises her as the ideal “little scrubber for him to have sex with”.

Meanwhile, in a prayer to the Almighty that any christian would recognise as blasphemy, Hacker owns to misgivings about the plan. (Cue for heavenly wrath in the form of terrifyingly loud thunder.) You might have noted, incidentally, the appetite — so far unalluded to — that ‘foreign’ foreign ministers can be presumed to have for jail-bait totty.

Yes, Prime Minister also contains along the way savage attacks on the integrity of the BBC and its director general (Tony Boncza), an all-out assault on people worried about global warming — the majority of scientists in a position to know, I believe — and a libel on the Home Secretary. “It’s no use talking to her after 6pm,” we are told. Note the ‘her’.

So much in the play leaves a nasty taste in the mouth that I marvel at the hilarity in the stalls around me on Monday.

True, there is at the start at least some of the sharp political observation for which Yes, Prime Minister was admired in its television form. But the excessive cynicism concerning the political classes — and, indeed, the civil servants typified by Cabinet Secretary Sir Humphrey Appleby and his ‘apprentice’ Bernard Woolley (Clive Hayward) — starts to grate fairly early in the drama.

Owing to the indisposition of Michael Simkins on Monday, the part of Sir Humphrey was taken for the night by understudy Simon Holmes. Effective though he was, his Appleby emerged as a deeply unpleasant, machiavellian individual rather than the loveable rogue presented on television by Nigel Hawthorne.

And talking of Nigels, the overacting complained of by some in Graham Seed’s portrayal of The Archers’ Nigel Pargetter — that screaming death plunge! — can be seen, too, in his turn as Hacker. His bawling histrionics supplied almost as big a shock at times (be warned) as the aforementioned thunderclaps.

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