‘Dr Strangelove’ theatre review: Steve Coogan and Armando Iannucci live up to the looming legacy of Stanley Kubrick
There are some films that lend themselves nicely to on-stage productions, but a Stanley Kubrick film is not one of them. The stage, with its limitations in terms of setting, cast size, run time and the basics like the ability to manoeuvre props on and off and get characters moved from scene to scene, requires a neatness or ease that Kubrick was never keen on. But with Armando Iannucci at the helm and Steve Coogan daring to tackle Peter Sellers’ tour de force multi-character role in the 1964 movie, London’s new production of Dr Strangelove is proof that perhaps all limitations can be overcome with enough talent.
It feels like there couldn’t be a better time to revive Dr Strangelove. When Kubrick’s film came out in the mid-1960s, the lengthy alternative title of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb must have felt like someone daring to go for the punchline before anyone else was willing to even make the joke. It was released at the very opening of a new wave of Cold War fear. As the Vietnam War was worsening and global tensions between the states and the Soviet Union still bubbled away, concerns over any kind of conflict took on a new level of fear in a post-1945 world where the use of nuclear weapons against Hiroshima and Nagasaki opened up a new age of horrific possibilities in warfare.
But at its core, Dr Strangelove is a story about foolish men with power. It begins with an out-of-control United States Air Force general, General Ripper, who launches a preemptive nuclear attack on Russia, using some loophole rule that allows inferiors to override even the president. Now, in a Trumpian world, characters like Ripper, played by John Hopper, feel as prescient as ever.
He’s a comedic character, yes, as the audience laughs at his unfalteringly confident stupidity. But he also becomes one of the many roles in the show that feels reignited with a new sense of meaning and cultural understanding as we now exist in yet another era where it feels like nutjobs are in power and they’ve got the nuclear codes.
I anticipated that a story about inept men trying to defuse a nuclear crisis instigated by pure folly would feel as relevant today as ever—especially under the direction of The Thick of It creator Iannucci. My real curiosity, however, lay in whether the adaptation could successfully replicate the duality of Kubrick’s original film. The challenge would be in balancing multiple sprawling settings and characters with the intense, focused atmosphere of the movie, which masterfully compresses nearly an hour of taut suspense into its tight 94-minute runtime.
Mostly, I wondered how anyone would be able to manage what Peter Sellers did in that film. In the 1964 movie, Kubrick cast Sellers as not only the titular nuclear expert and implied ex-Nazi Dr Strangelove but as the opposing character of US president Merkin Muffley and the voice of reason RAF office Group Captain Mandrake. Not only did Steve Coogan take on all three of those roles, but he also added in a third as he played Major JT Kong, the pilot with that iconic scene riding the bomb. It’s a bold move. Attempting to play three roles on stage, navigating costume changes and three vastly different accents and characters is hard enough, so to add in a fourth is incredibly impressive.
But just as how the movie stood as a testament to Sellers’ talent, this new play is an absolute shrine to Coogan’s. There is barely a moment where he isn’t on stage in one or other of his characters. The switch-arounds were handled masterfully, using body doubles to keep the president in the war room setting even as Coogan switched into Dr Strangelove and using pre-recorded clips to allow his various characters to be in conversation.
He never missed a beat and never let a moment slip, as all four characters were given the same level of attention to detail as four vastly different but equally as thorough and entertaining figures. No one role won out; his Strangelove was perfectly silly yet sinister, his president was gripping, his Mandrake was bashfully loveable, and his Kong was suitably deranged. His performance is a triumph that it’s obvious an almost unimaginable amount of work and preparation has gone into. Without a doubt, it’s Coogan’s talent that makes the show a success.
But all around, Dr Strangelove is handled with such sharpness amidst the humour. The dark comedy of the original translates perfectly to stage for a laugh-a-minute show that keeps you entertained from start to finish. The jokes understand their shelf life and wrap up before they’re overdone and the script balancing iconic lines from the original with new, modernised material for a new audience and format.
On every level, from the staging to the absurd needle-drop music moments, it’s clear that every care has gone into making a production that lives up to and honours its looming source material while refreshing it enough to make something newly exciting and made for the stage. It takes Kubrick’s world and reshapes it in a way that’s both a homage to the classic and a bold new take by a team of experts in the world of dark comedy. In that way, it’s an opus on an opus.
