With its legend tied up in that of its director Stanley Kubrick, its star Peter Sellers, its magnificent monochrome cinematography and moreover its release against the backdrop of the actual Cold War, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a film comedy that gets treated with arthouse reverence.
And for that reason, there are nagging doubts about the idea of a stage version. Is director Sean Foley in the same league as Kubrick? Is Coogan in the same league as Sellers? Can it possibly be anything like as timely as the original? What do you do about the whole black and white thing?
Broadly speaking the answers are no, no, no and well what do you think? But here’s the thing: at its heart Armando Iannucci and Foley‘s stage adaptation is just very aware that Dr Strangelove is fun, funny and possessed of a play-like structure, with the action almost all taking place in two locations.
Foley’s production has some bite, but it’s also light and zingy, confident that with a couple of tweaks and a few new gags, the absurdist satire of the source material will amuse.
Taking on the same roles Sellers did - plus one extra - Coogan is particularly strong as the most Alan Partridge-esque of the characters, Captain Lional Mandrake, a hapless RAF man who has been seconded to bonkers American General Ripper (John Hopkins). As the story begins, it‘s slowly dawning on the affable, servile Mandrake that Ripper might be totally fucking insane. And so it proves, as the paranoid commanding officer uses a ‘creative’ interpretation of military protocol to circumnavigate the chain of command and call a massive nuclear strike on the USSR.
This does not go unnoticed by said chain of command: President Merkin Muffley (Coogan again) is aghast and assembles his cabinet, generals and creepy ex-Nazi scientist Dr Strangelove (Coogan, of course) to try and come up with a plan to stop the bombers, who will answer to a code that only Ripper knows.
There are a handful of very obvious Iannucci lines, two of them wryly referencing the lack of women in the cast - I think it’s right to acknowledge it but also probably reasonable to not add female roles to a story that’s basically about men destroying the planet.
For the most part it’s funny because it’s very cognisant of why the film was funny - the dialogue is relentlessly amusing, and the characters are a dream. Muffley is a fairly straight role for Coogan, but he’s entertaining as Strangelove and an absolute hoot in the (spoiler alert) bonus role as bomber commander Major TJ Kong, who is revealed to us via a nifty start of second half coup de theatre in Hildegarde Bechtler’s set. Hopkins is fun as the lunatic Ripper, while Giles Terera is delightful - if perhaps rather luxury casting for a support part - as flamboyant military man General Turgidson.
Ultimately we have to return to the fact that the film was audacious and the play isn’t, really - it’s a slick stage tribute to a beloved 70-year-old movie that captures the reasons why it was a hit but less so the reasons why it’s a masterpiece. Even Coogan hopping between roles feels relatively matter of fact - the man has a background in character comedy, the changes are enacted without any great fuss, and moveover the audacity of Dr Strangelove was in the fact of casting Sellers in multiple roles in the first place – and the hallucinatory quality that engendered – rather than it merely being impressive he could play the roles.
But again: I think this was always the wisest approach, rather than try and out-auteur Kubrick. It’s an accomplished, funny West End comedy, and even if the Cold War is over it still has some topical bite, As the US elections roll around again, the idea of a generation of American men gearing up to do something totally insane and self-destructive – with catastrophic repercussions for the rest of the planet – truly does not seem out of date at all.
