‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here – this is the War Room!’ Stanley Kubrick’s dark, delicious Cold War satire turns 60 this year. This assured, imaginative stage version brings his apocalyptic film bang up to date.
Sean Foley’s production doesn’t tamper with the 1960s setting. We’re still in 1964, in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ten years ago, it might have seemed like a quaint period piece. Yet with Russia on the warpath again, it now feels horribly topical. Sixty years on, Kubrick’s terrifying question still resonates: could a single madman trigger a nuclear war?
Before I saw this show, I’d assumed that Dr Strangelove was simply too big for the stage. It features a bloody battle between the US army and the US air force. Much of the action takes place aboard a B-52 bomber. Yet Foley is a director renowned for his bold, creative staging. In his hands, the most unwieldy parts of Kubrick’s film become the most thrilling.
The script is co-written by Foley and Armando Iannucci (whose numerous credits include The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin). It follows Kubrick’s screenplay pretty closely, but there are a lot of new jokes. I feared these might jar, but they fit into his story almost seamlessly. This Dr Strangelove is more overtly comic, but it remains faithful to his vision.
The shining star of Kubrick’s movie was Peter Sellers, giving his greatest film performance in three contrasting comic roles. I used to think it’d be impossible for anyone to fill his shoes, but when I heard Steve Coogan had been cast in the title role I felt sure he’d be a perfect fit.
There’s always been something about Coogan that’s reminded me of Sellers, ever since I first saw him on the comedy circuit, more than 30 years ago: his chameleon-like capacity to inhabit multiple personalities; the distant, slightly dislocated quality of some of his finest acting.
Coogan is a brilliant mimic, and he surely could have done an immaculate imitation of Sellers if he’d wanted to. Instead, he dares to do something quite different. His Dr Strangelove is delightfully, hilariously camp, which somehow makes him even more sinister than Sellers’ colder villain. Yet the role that impressed me most was his hapless Captain Mandrake. In a story severely short of sympathetic characters, he infuses this RAF officer with fragility and humanity, giving us someone to root for.
Sellers played three parts in the film. In the play, Coogan plays four: not only Dr Strangelove, Captain Mandrake and the US President, but also Major Kong, the gung-ho pilot who drops the bomb. Unlike Sellers in the movie, Coogan has to switch between these roles at lightning pace. The costume changes are incredibly quick, but what’s even more impressive is the way he morphs so smoothly between four entirely different characters.
There are only a few occasions when Coogan isn’t onstage, and in such a virtuoso vehicle it would be easy to reduce the other characters to comic feeds, merely providing set-ups for his punchlines. It’s to Coogan’s immense credit (and Foley’s, and Iannucci’s) that the other characters have room to breathe. John Hopkins is a wonderfully demented General Ripper, and Giles Terera is an intensely charismatic General Turgidson. He almost convinced me that a pre-emptive strike on Russia might actually be a good idea.
Are there any flaws? A few, but they’re all endemic to Kubrick’s movie. Apart from Penny Ashmore’s Vera Lynn, who sings We’ll Meet Again as the bomb goes off, there are no female characters (Foley and Iannucci have eliminated Kubrick’s only woman, General Turgidson’s secretary/mistress, who spends most of her working hours in her bikini). This inevitably makes the script feel somewhat dry. The US President is rather thinly drawn, and some of the War Room scenes are a bit static, but these are minute blemishes. The show's a joy.
And even though Dr Strangelove is full of laughter, like all the best comedies its central message is profound. ‘As fewer and fewer people find solace in religion as a buffer between themselves and the terminal moment, I actually believe that they unconsciously derive a kind of perverse solace from the idea that in the event of a nuclear war, the world dies with them,’ said Kubrick. ‘God is dead, but the bomb endures.’
