In this stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley seem to stay close to the original, with Steve Coogan playing several characters as Peter Sellers did in the original—in fact taking on one more role than the three that Sellers played. They haven’t tried to update it. This is still a world not long after the Cuban Missile Crisis, with the US and USSR poised to retaliate if the other should launch nuclear weapons against them.
A rogue US Air Force general at Burpelson Air Force Base issues orders to the B-52 bombers he commands to attack Soviet targets with the nuclear bombs that they carry. Steve Coogan makes his first appearance as Group Captain Henry Mandrake, the British exchange officer assigned to be General Jack Ripper’s executive officer who, when he realises what is happening, tries to stop it. But only Ripper knows the code that can recall them.
Across America in the Pentagon War Room, US President Merkin Muffley (played by Coogan) and his advisers have discovered what is happening, and the action then moves between the air base and the Pentagon and later to the cockpit of a B-52 piloted by Stetson-wearing Major Kong (Coogan again), and when the President calls in his wheelchair-bound scientific adviser Dr Strangelove, he too is played by Coogan.
Only offstage when doing a costume and character quick change, Steve Coogan has a ball being funny as the languid, posh RAF man with a vocabulary beyond US generals, the bland ineffectual President, the gung-ho pilot riding an atom bomb like a rodeo bronco and especially as former Nazi Strangelove, desperately trying to control a right arm that keeps raising itself in a Seig Heil!
Coogan is joined by equally powerful performers. John Hopkins is deranged General Ripper, going on about the Russians polluting his body fluids; Giles Terera is General Turgidson in the Pentagon, a realist trying to keep his eagerness to fight in check; and Tony Jayawardena as the Russian Ambassador, trying to take photos with a spy camera and himself letting out secrets.
Coogan’s multiple changes are cleverly contrived, often with the help of the scene changes which are always animated as they move between locations. Designer Hildegard Bechtler gives Ripper a solid-looking office with a collection of weapons on the wall, a vast War Room with maps showing target sites, plane movements and data, all on a huge screen, and, with the help of projections, brings a B-52 on stage flying over barren Russian mountains.
Back in 1964, this all seemed almost too close to reality to be funny, though that didn’t stop me laughing. Today, it is still savage satire but I’m not laughing—not so much anyway, though Strangelove’s raised hand in its black glove certainly set me off.
In a world of Putin and Trump, of Middle East and Ukrainian battlegrounds, let alone freak weather and clime change, our world seems equally in danger. The show starts and ends with a song and a simple dance routine for the whole company: I could have done with a few more to buoy my spirits up (unable to make press night, I saw it on US election night, which perhaps had an influence). Of course, satire should always be serious, but go in a better frame of mood to really enjoy it.