Rep do well with tired, old Minister

Yes, Prime Minister, Canterbury Repertory Theatre, directed by Dimitri Gibara Elmwood Auditorium, runs until May 20

If a week is a long time in politics, then seven years can make a satirical play feel positively ancient.

Yes, Prime Minister is a seven-yearold play based on a television show that has been off air for nearly 30 years. In the age of Brexit and Trump, the politics of this satire feel dreadfully irrelevant.

The Canterbury Repertory Theatre do a fine job of bringing the comedy to life, but it is an odd choice of material for the current political moment.

The action takes place over one night in the British Prime Minister’s country home, Chequers, and concerns the delicate balance of power between a politician and his civil servants.

Prime Minister Jim Hacker, played with clammy venality by Ian Lester, is struggling with a sticky diplomatic fracas involving a dignitary from the fictional country of Kumranistan.

He is assisted and obstructed in his struggles by pompous and entitled senior civil servant Sir Humphrey (Raoul Neave), younger and more idealistic private secretary Bernard (Fraser Robinson) and amoral special adviser Claire Sutton (Erin Callanan). The three principal characters are wellcast and perfectly embody these political archetypes.

But the elaborate and incredibly wordy script asks a lot of these amateur actors. The cast members largely rise to the challenge, but the delivery is sometimes a little stilted and faltering.

The play is handsomely staged, with the opulence of a prime ministerial manor house subtly evoked and a lighting scheme that neatly fades into evening as the PM works through the night.

The farce-infused script is wellstructured, pacey and delivers enough jokes to briefly distract you from the dated politics. There are a few moments that are neatly staged and perfectly timed to fully exploit those jokes.

But there is no escaping the fact this material is fusty, dusty and tired.