Dr Strangelove at the Noël Coward Theatre: Steve Coogan’s masterclass performance is the highlight of this Kubrick adaptation

In September last year, the Stanley Kubrick estate announced that actor, impressionist and comedian Steve Coogan would be taking the lead role (all four of them) in a play of Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. This is the first ever stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s strident 1964 nuclear comedy and cold war satire. Now on at London’s Noël Coward Theatre, the production has been co-adapted by Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci.

Kubrick’s 1964 film is a Kafkaesque, nightmare comedy. It starred actor and comedian Peter Sellers in three of the four roles now taken up by Coogan (Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and the eponymous Dr Strangelove).

The film was a product of the British satire boom of the 1960s which included the satirical comedy programme That Was The Week That Was, and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Kubrick’s film was based on the 1958 novel Two Hours to Doom by Peter George.

Given the creative trifecta of Foley, Iannucci and Coogan at the hub of this adaptive project, it ought to be a shoo-in for success, revised and adapted as a potent riposte to the global political turmoil we find ourselves surrounded by. So it was something of a shame to discover that the production is good, but not great.

Missed opportunities

The play looks spectacular in terms of Hildegard Bechtler’s magnificent staging and incredibly mobile set design (which retains and homages British set designer Ken Adam’s work for Kubrick’s film, including the iconic war room design). And there are a couple of Trump jokes and a reference to the current Israel-Gaza conflict.

But the production fails to commit fully to any incisive or urgent critique of the current global crises, as Kubrick and screenwriter Terry Southern responded to the nuclear crises and paranoia of the cold war.

By the end this left me wondering what the point of the exercise was. It cleaves closely to the film (with one or two modern twists) and keeps some of the more famous elements of comic dialogue. But it takes few real risks with the story, reducing and streamlining it to its core. Perhaps it was felt that just staging such a complex piece was risk enough.

Coogan’s performance is the linchpin of the production and he is on stage for almost all of it. It’s a masterclass in comic acting and timing, even though at times he can’t quite stop Alan Partridge making an appearance – especially when performing the role of Group Captain Mandrake.

This is the most successful of the four roles he plays, and easily the most physical. Mandrake has all the action sequences as he attempts to retrieve the recall codes from the increasingly psychotic General Jack D. Ripper played with Trumpish machismo by John Hopkins.

It must be an exhausting process for Coogan to play four roles. His fourth, Major Kong, the atom bomb-riding bomber commander was played in the film by Slim Pickens. Here, Coogan’s performance is reminiscent of Robert Duvall’s Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now (1979).

The other key standout performance in the play is given by Giles Terera as General Buck Turgidson. While he never quite reaches George C. Scott’s level of paranoia and indignation about the Russian ambassador seeing “the big board”, he embodies a similar sense of priapic American militarism and manhood.

The challenges of staging Strangelove

Coogan’s portrayal of Strangelove cleaves closely to Sellers’s own performance. Unfortunately, in the war room scenes, the quick changes required of Coogan as he morphs from President Muffley to Dr Strangelove are less than seamless. His replacement as the president with a body double whose back is to the audience is persistently distracting.

There are, however, some interesting and deliberate incongruities which remind us of the film’s contemporary resonance, and juxtapose the past and the present. The “big board” in the war room is a modern digital version of that in the film. The set backdrops utilise digital computer screens through which Strangelove initially communicates his presence (here Coogan looks like a more sinister Andy Warhol). And the Dr’s infamous sieg-heiling arm is powered by modern automation – a result of self-imposed “human augmentation” and medical experimentation.

Kubrick’s film ends with a montage of exploding mushroom clouds choreographed to the sounds of the wartime classic We’ll Meet Again as the world burns. In this production, the song’s singer, Vera Lynn (here played by Penny Ashmore), makes an appearance as an angel emerging from an underground mineshaft to give a rousing rendition of the song in homage to the film’s nuclear grand finale.

While this might diminish the terrifying power of the film’s original apocalyptic ending, it does help you to leave the theatre feeling a bit easier about our impending doom.

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Matthew Melia does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.