David Haig on Working with Daniel Radcliffe and Starring in London's Yes, Prime Minister

David Haig is a familiar and always-welcome presence on the London stage, where he is back this season in one of the West End’s few new hit plays, Yes, Prime Minister. Based on the popular BBC-TV series from the 1980s, the comedy centers on Jim Hacker, the nation’s leader, a role created by the late Paul Eddington and now played by Haig. The 55-year-old star has amassed credits ranging from an Olivier Award-winning performance in Our Country’s Good, Yasmina Reza’s Art on both sides of the Atlantic and an Olivier-nominated performance as Mr. Banks in Mary Poppins. On screen, he remains best-known for playing one of the various grooms in the 1994 smash Four Weddings and a Funeral and for writing and starring in the TV film My Boy Jack opposite Daniel Radcliffe, Kim Cattrall and Carey Mulligan. Broadway.com checked in with the warm, welcoming performer one recent afternoon just before his afternoon nap at the Gielgud Theatre.

You’re in one of the few bona-fide commercial successes of the current West End season in a genre—namely, satire—that in America famously closes on Saturday night.
I think there’s something particular to these two writers [Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn] that they achieve the specifics of satire at the same time as a universal observation of the way politics works. Also, it’s true to say that we do like satire in this country, which has something to do with what Americans might perceive as that traditional self-deprecation the British are so good at—though we do have plenty of arrogant features, as well [laughs].

The play finds the Prime Minister, Jim Hacker, along with his Cabinet Secretary, Sir Humphrey Appleby [played by Henry Goodman], in a plot that at times gets pretty “out there,” politically and sexually. What did you think when you first read the script?
My initial hunch was that this was brilliant—because what the writers have done is seduce an audience for the first 25 minutes into thinking they are cosily nostalgic and watching an episode of Yes, Prime Minister, then along comes this plot crunch we can’t talk about that makes the whole event a little edgier and drives the piece into a fantastical farce in the second half. It isn’t just an homage to the series.

Paul Eddington was so associated with your role, just as Nigel Hawthorne was with Sir Humphrey.
And Paul Eddington's widow came to the press night, which was rather moving. She was there out of loyalty to Paul, and yet completely open to the way it had evolved. As far as my taking on the role, as I’ve said over the months, why should one be deterred by a previous iconic performance? After all, Shakespearean actors honor and respect the great Hamlets or Lears over the years, but that doesn’t stop them performing the next one. In the same way, I wasn’t scared of doing this, especially once I saw that Jim Hacker has been given a harder, street-fighting edge as a politician that I could exploit as an actor.

Do you feel a pressure to keep updating the script to accommodate current events?
Well, last night one character spoke about Ireland being bailed out of the EU instead of Spain and Portugal, so we can be topical in that way. But I think it’s dangerous to go too far down that line. If you get too specific, suddenly everybody thinks, “David Cameron hasn’t just been re-elected like Jim Hacker,” and it opens more questions than it’s worth. The thing to say about the script is that it is a piece of astonishing prescience: They wrote it about two years ago, since which time only three lines have been shifted, the one about the Irish included. Otherwise, it exists as a two-year-old play in which all these issues have woken up as the run has gone on: the salaries at the BBC, the curtailing of civil servants’ power, a country being bailed out by a massive EU loan and so on.

During the show, you get to exhibit your skill at onstage meltdowns, having done versions of the same in Art and Donkeys’ Years, among other plays.
I think it’s true of any actor that their career becomes somewhat self-perpetuating. In my case, if somebody comes along with a play about someone who disintegrates, I get the call for those parts! [Laughs.] I then find myself doing them again, and I absolutely love it—though, I have to say, I’m 55 now and it’s more knackering [tiring] than it used to be. The challenge for this one isn’t so much physically as it is vocally. The comedy thrives on Hacker’s incandescent fury and frustration, so a lot of shouting does go on.

In the run-up to New Year’s, the producers have given you and the company eight shows across four days—talk about a marathon!
I know, and before all that, I’m getting married after 31 years to the mother of my five children [actress Jane Galloway] in Devon, so I shall be full of celebratory food and probably alcohol when I return. I will burn the excess off very rapidly, unlike the rest of the populace [laughs].

Getting married after 31 years? What do your children think?
We thought it might be nice to legitimize them after all this time [laughs]. Our two sons still maintain this slightly 1960s idea that it is quite cool to have unmarried parents around, but our three daughters are very into the idea [of a wedding] and so are we, frankly. We’re getting married on an island that is inaccessible at high tide so it turns out that, legally, we have to get married at low tide in case there is a non-swimming objector to the marriage; it’s some sort of arcane British law.

Sounds as if there’s a play there! You have such a broad resume, from Four Weddings and a Funeral to writing a play and TV film for yourself in My Boy Jack.
It feels very balanced. With Four Weddings, I don’t think anybody from [writer] Richard Curtis down thought that a small British movie would have that kind of reach. It’s not until producers send you an invitation to the Czech Republic’s distribution party that you think, “Why are the upper middle classes in Britain proving so attractive the world over?” The thing I will go to my grave with is managing to get My Boy Jack filmed. There’s something about having that as a lifelong memento of something I’ve written that means an enormous amount to me.

Daniel Radcliffe was mid-Potter when you cast him in the title role as Rudyard Kipling’s son, Jack.
Funnily enough, he’d been to see Journey’s End twice, and I found him an extraordinarily interested and interesting and bright guy. Not for one second was he anything but an actor who had been employed to pay and investigate that part, and similarly Kim [Cattrall]: Both of them were very, very serious about the work.