Showing @ King’s Theatre, Edinburgh, 8-12 Mar

‘Is it possible to be right-wing and funny,’ asked The Independent recently of Kelsey Grammar’s newly broadcast US channel The Right Network, but fans of Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn’s classic sitcom have known this to be true for a long time. Shameless Thatcherites (Jay was her political adviser), the show was an expertly weaved farce whose prime satirical target was a bloated state and public sector, with the desire to cut red tape masking the ideological interest in cutting any vaguely red impulses in the state. As Cameron and co. are vehemently demonstrating, the point in cutting back the state is to allow business to dominate over pesky public interests.

Updating the characters to the modern political landscape (there’s mention of a coalition agreement, financial crisis and, most dubiously, global warming), Jay and Lynn once again take aim at a confused political system, showing them to have lost little of their stinging wit and intelligence. Cabinet Secretary  Sir Humphrey (Simon Williams) is still advising a generally exasperated Prime Minister Jim Hacker (Richard McCabe), with the question of who’s really calling the shots as murky as ever. In order to tackle the deficit, the administration has lined up a deal for an oil pipeline in (fictional) Kumranistan in order to secure a vast loan, but here’s the rub; the Kumranistan Prime Minister will only go through with the deal if private secretary Bernard (Chris Larkin) can provide him with an underage girl to spend the night with (anything’s better than taxing the banks), but will they go through with it?

Perhaps not the most high-minded of plot hooks, but one which sets the stage for an examination into how far politicians will go to protect their interests. There’s plenty of the pithy jabs at out-of-touch politicians; “I don’t talk to ordinary people unless there’s an election going on,” declares Hacker at one point; as well as a conveyance of serious tensions that exist in parliament between officials and politicians, all of which a spot on cast lap up. But if Jay and Lynn are a little easier on the state than in the old days, the discard for the issue of global warming (here presented as little more than a cloak for politicians to disguise economic woe in) shows they’re still thoroughly reactionary at heart. But perhaps the joy of the Yes, Prime Minister pantheon is felt by those of both the left and right persuasion for another reason; that what the show incidentally satirises is the notion of an elect few having such power over the entire population; if cutting back the state really was about getting power down to the public (as opposed to the real agenda, cutting public services and handing power to unaccountable private interests) then this would be a thoroughly good thing, and this series’ mockery of those who think they know best for everyone (even though its authors were gullible enough to think Thatcher did), is what makes it such an enduring and relevant piece of theatre.