Stanley Kubrick’s DR STRANGELOVE
Adapted by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley
directed by Sean Foley
Noël Coward Theatre, London – until 25 January 2025
An artistic response to the nihilistic hysteria and dread of the Cold War era, Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film feels horribly relevant as it hits the stage today as an absurdist black comedy full of belly laughs but infused with a very real sense of danger. At a time when the global sabre-rattling around nuclear weapons is louder than at any other period in recent history, Dr Strangelove, as reimagined for the theatre by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, is as unsettling as it is hilarious in its caricature-esque depiction of the various maniacs, cowards, diplomats and fanatics who hold the keys (literal and metaphorical) to mutually assured destruction.
Steve Coogan inherits Peter Sellers’s multi-role mantle, even adding an extra character to the roster of parts he gets to perform: like his celluloid predecessor, he plays Mandrake, the British RAF man stuck between the rock and hard place of having to placate John Hopkins’s lunatic General Ripper (“we don’t want to start a nuclear war unless we really really have to”) while also realising the impending danger, plus the American President, and titular Strangelove, a wheelchair-occupying scientific adviser with a camply preposterous Teutonic accent and nefarious links to the Third Reich.
On screen, Slim Pickens was deranged American bomber pilot Major TJ ‘King’ Kong when Sellers sustained an injury but here Coogan also gets to don the cowboy hat and sunglasses, gleefully riding pillion atop a nuclear warhead to light the touch paper on Armageddon. It’s a tour de force quartet of roles and Coogan is thrillingly up to it, making each character vivid, specific and plausible within the bonkers, high stakes confines of Foley’s bombastic staging. Strangelove is a particularly glorious creation, part man, part machine, sibilantly decrying the Nazis at every available opportunity while constantly trying to stop his recalcitrant electronic right hand from raising in an involuntary ‘Heil Hitler’ salute.
Brilliant though Coogan is, Dr Strangelove is far from a one man show. Hopkins is alarmingly funny as the gung-ho, machine gun-toting American General drunk on pure grain alcohol diluted with rain water, as is Giles Terera as a war-mongering Presidential advisor who’d rather annihilate the human race than admit defeat. Tony Jayawardena is wonderfully wired as an appalled Russian ambassador in fear for his life after spilling the beans on his own country’s Doomsday plans, and Mark Hadfield delights as the forlornly inadequate Faceman, trying with fake cheer to convince the US President that things aren’t as hopeless and terrifying as they appear (“we’re offering the Russians an American city to destroy. It sounds bad but it’s not.”) Ben Turner’s fierce but astonishingly dim Colonel (his name Bat Guano literally meaning Bat Shit as in “bat shit crazy” as other characters are constantly at pains to point out to him) is another blast of comic inspiration.
The apocalypse-with-slapstick nature of Dr Strangelove entirely suits Iannucci’s signature style of the deadly serious frothed up with sharp satire and rollicking entertainment value, and Foley’s innate comic flair, as director and writing collaborator, catapults the whole extravaganza into the stratosphere. The sense of the ridiculousness of these puffed-up, self-important men (“you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” bellows one of them as diplomatic tensions boil over into actual physical violence at one point) is tempered with the creeping, dreadful realisation that these suited and booted fools have access to weaponry that could be curtains for all of us. If black comedy is your vibe, then what’s on offer here is pure jet.
The pace and dynamism slackens off a little after the interval and the law of diminishing returns means that the fun of watching Coogan re-emerge transformed into a new character every couple of minutes, decreases as the evening wears on. Still, the production is handsomely mounted, Hildegard Bechtler’s monumental sets gliding and soaring into place, strikingly and inventively lit by Jessica Hung Han Yun, with extensive projection design by Akhila Krishnan. Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design and music are suitably terrifying.
The austere opulence of the show’s overall look and the gleaming slickness of the staging sometimes feel at odds with the cartoon-made-flesh manic pitch of the performances but maybe that is the point of an evening that seeks to be a biting comedy, an earnest warning and an apocalyptic vaudeville, and frequently all at the same time. It’s certainly a thumping good piece of theatre, but don’t be surprised if that smile freezes on your face and the laughter gets stuck in your throat.
ajhlovestheatre 
Leave a comment