Dr Strangelove at Noël Coward Theatre

It almost seems too easy. When faced with the question of just how Armando Iannucci would go about adapting Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, it’s tempting to say he’s already done it. Within Kubrick’s coterie of backroom wheeler dealers – as blithely evil as they are idiotic, as hapless as they are dangerous – one can see the blueprint for all of Iannucci’s own colourfully banal schemers. In his mounting, impotent desperation, Peter Sellers’s doomed US President finds his shadow in In the Loop’s hopeless MP (Tom Hollander), and his exhausted admission of defeat: “I’m a government minister. And I don’t have control of my own blinds.” In the aforementioned film, the advent of war in Iraq and the deaths of millions were a result of bullying the right bureaucrats and telling the right lies, saner truths be damned. This made it as true a spiritual successor to Kubrick’s film as can be found.

Still, if Iannucci’s dependable satirical hand has a weakness, it’s in pumping farcical air into dead spaces where it may not be needed. So much of the deadly dry comedy of Dr Strangelove is in its lengthy spells of silence, as the pencil pushers who hold the future of mankind in the balance sit in awed realisation of their own powerlessness. It’s a tricky thing to replicate, especially on the stage, where any silences can be taken as the cast simply waiting for the laughs to come. Iannucci and Sean Foley’s new adaptation does, for a time, appear to have succumbed to this issue. The early going feels strained, as the RAF officer Mandrake (Steve Coogan) clashes with a rogue general (John Hopkins) over the matter of calling off a nuclear payload sent on its merry way to Russia. Perhaps it’s that Mandrake’s relative sanity marks him out as an easy audience surrogate; his mild-mannered objections to senseless destruction encourage soft, knowing chuckles that suggest an audience being flattered, rather than confronted.

It doesn’t necessarily help that, unlike the lack of fuss that greeted Sellers’s onscreen shapeshifting, the stage Dr Strangelove cannot help but call some measure of attention to the amount of work Coogan (and the costume department) is putting in. Coogan takes four roles (a level up from Sellers’s three), alternating from Mandrake to the stiff upper lip President to a behatted Texan attack dog and, finally, the titular Dr Strangelove, a Nazi Dr Evil who seems scarcely interested in saving the world. He’s at ease in all four roles, but it’s little surprise when much of the intermission chatter is occupied with the ease and frequency of his transformations, rather than the acrid aftertaste the comedy they serve ought to be leaving. Stronger is Giles Terera’s bloodthirsty General Turgidson, whom the actor infuses with almost endearing naivete. We sense that the General believes the worst will come to pass, but that he himself will somehow be spared, even as the walls close around him in the play’s back half.

It’s here that the stage Dr Strangelove’s early softballs ultimately prove deceptive. A contemporary play about our imminent self-destruction needn’t work very hard to feel prescient, but Foley and Iannucci’s production comes to earn our shudders as the crisis escalates. The pit in our stomachs grows heavier with each dismissal of truth, each triumph of individual pettiness over reason. We see just how easily the pieces fall into place for doomsday, and we find that this worst-case scenario rings true, even in its wackiest particulars. When staring down the barrel of nuclear apocalypse, who’s to say a Bond baddie with bad hair won’t become the self-appointed saviour to whom those in power desperately defer?

Come its startling coup de grace, both honouring the film and finally and fully transcending it, the laughs have long made way for clammy dread. Mission accomplished, then, and proof that Kubrick’s material retains much of its disquieting effect.

Ultimately, this production gains in power and confidence as it goes, the broader farce of the stage giving way to a conclusion even more confronting of its audience than the film to which it is indebted.

Thomas Messner
Photos: Manuel Harlan

Dr Strangelove is at Noël Coward Theatre from 8^th October 2024 until 25^th January 2025. For further information or to book visit the theatre’s website here.

Watch the trailer for Dr Strangelove at Noël Coward Theatre here: