Simon Callow to star in new play about Yes Minister's characters in their obscurity

Yes Minister’s Sir Humphrey Appleby and Jim Hacker are to be revived in a new stage play.

Simon Callow will star as the fictional former Prime Minister, who is now an octogenarian master of an Oxford College, in the production I'm Sorry Prime Minister I Can't Quite Remember.

But his out-of-date ideas land him in trouble with the woke students, so he calls his former cabinet secretary, to be played by Clive Francis, to get him out of the pickle.

Original co-writer Jonathan Lynn has penned the play and will also direct it, saying: ‘People kept asking me what became of those characters.’

He told The Times he wanted to  explore ‘what happens to people who have tremendous power and influence . . . and then have none and when they are old they are forgotten’ – as well as how they would react to a a world that has gone ‘crazy, as far as they are concerned’.

The play will run at the Cambridge Arts Theatre and from June 18 to 27, then visit the Royal and Derngate Northampton, Oxford Playhouse, Cheltenham Everyman Theatre, The Lowry Salford and Malvern Theatres in subsequent weeks.

Sir Humphry and Jim Hacker last appeared on stage in a play based on Yes Prime Minister in the West End in 2012.

Published: 6 Mar 2020