Stage review: Yes Prime Minister, Gielgud Theatre

The promise of a cathartic workout of head nodding and "hear, hear-ing" will see coachloads of irate middle Englanders storming the Gielgud for this one.

Mostly this fulmination is directed through the person of Jim Hacker, besieged prime minister, misunderstood statesman, accident waiting to happen.

An eye-poppingly splenetic David Haig gives an acrobatic, wits-end performance - demonstrative, beleaguered, breathless and perpetually exasperated with a world that fails to deliver him a break from the onslaught of mishaps, misunderstandings and dodgy decisions that dog his night at Chequers.

One minute he squirms acutely at his self-authored humiliations, the next he rejoices as he finds a get-out clause that buys him a few minutes' reprieve.

Part John Cleese, part Victor Meldrew, he embarks upon rant-athons against the low-hanging fruit of the BBC, the euro, the gold-plated civil service.

And, just when the vein on his forehead triggers Defcon Two, he turns it up a notch. Haig offers a masterclass, a tour de force of energetic, sweaty comic acting.

Initially, though, the tone is jarring. This is spiky and discomforting stuff compared to the gentle teasing of the classic TV sitcom. Close to overwrought in the first act, the Kama Sutra of political contortions required by the second finally matches the manic pitch.

Slick Sir Humphrey Appleby was the string-puller extraordinaire in the original. Here, Sir H (Henry Goodman) is still armed with the jargon-infested tongue twisters of his predecessor but has little else in his arsenal.

And, unlike Sir Humphrey of old, he is more overtly scheming in his own interests, ever ready with a can of WD40 to ease the passage of the revolving door.

Clearly, times have changed and politics have become sleazier. This YPM, written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn, is a more direct assault, a congress of the oleaginous, the unpalatable and the irredeemable dumped in an arena to fight for their miserable lives.

There's a plot - bordering on farce - that twists tight as a tourniquet. A deal for a trillion euro pipeline would end the financial crisis and keep Hacker's faltering regime alive. But the deal hangs on the PM providing the visiting Kumranistan minister with some particular nocturnal entertainment. The Queen's helicopter may need to be requisitioned to fly in a call girl.

"Would people understand?" asks Hacker, genuinely perplexed, his moral compass in a tailspin.

Cue anguished explorations of cultural imperialism, moral equivalence, patriotic duty and the greater good - all delivered at breakneck speed and with a deft script crammed with laser-guided one-liners.

Add in a morally agnostic Special Adviser Claire (Emily Joyce), Bernard (Jonathan Slinger) the naif who sees the emperor without his clothes, a BBC director-general (William Chubb) put on the spot over his remuneration and a rip-roaring Paxman-a-like TV inquisitor (Tim Wallers) and, once again, the neat carve-up of power between the elected, the self-serving and the self-appointed is skewered with the precision of a keyhole surgeon pricking a conscience.

– From September 2010