To Americans who still felt like they were the good guys after swaggering to the rescue in the Second World War, Dr Strangelove must have felt like a brutal kick in the nuts. The portrait painted in Stanley Kubrick’s scathing 1964 Cold War satire, of a perverted, paranoid, trigger-happy clique steering the US towards destruction, doesn’t feel as radical six decades later, after the successive indignities of Watergate, Reagan, and Trump. Still, it’s a brilliant excuse for Steve Coogan to make a rare stage appearance, following in the footsteps of Peter Sellers to play multiple military oddballs in this story of pre-apocalyptic mayhem.
He’s closest to home as Captain Mandrake, an English air force man stationed in rural America: Coogan manipulates language like it’s a silken cravat, twisting his words into deliciously erudite incomprehensibility. He’s got no hope of talking down cigar-smoking local tyrant General Ripper (John Hopkins), whose obsession with fluoride conspiracy theories has spiralled into sending unauthorised nuclear bombers to attack key Russian targets.
Scenes flit between their crazed interactions and the Pentagon, where Coogan plays both bluff President Muffley – who’s desperately trying to defuse the situation – and the sinuous Dr Strangelove, a black-gloved, German-accented former Nazi weapons expert, creepily oblivious to human suffering. Oh, and he goes one step further than Sellers (who only played three roles in the movie) by also embodying yee-hawing cowboy pilot Major TJ Kong, who’s got a worrying hard-on for nuclear destruction.
Comedy famously ages badly but the humour here is evergreen, prickling with ingenious wordplay and sickly surrealism. Still, Sean Foley’s overly efficient production stops short of full comic mayhem. Coogan is oh-so-good and oh-so-professional, but he’d be funnier if this show let us see some of the messy vulnerability that makes his creation Alan Partridge so lovable – if it let us glimpse the manic charging around and sweat and hectic costume changes behind the scenes, or revelled in the crowd’s glee at each successive reappearance.
Foley and Armando Iannucci’s adaptation also plays it safe – ironically, for a story stuffed with people messing about with warheads. They resist the temptation to add in wry modern references (thank God there are no platinum-blonde Trump wigs) and only intervene to carefully defuse the original’s sexism, replacing the film’s only female character, a trolley dolly and real-life Playboy Bunny, with a male waiter. And they’re even more cautious with the character of Strangelove, probably aware that using a disability and a foreign accent as a byword for deep creepiness isn’t a great look.
There are moments that signal another, weirder approach – like the opening dance to soul song “Try a Little Tenderness”, the cast awkwardly thrusting their crotches like they’re in a malfunctioning aeroplane ejector seat. But mostly, it feels like this production is aiming too hard for cinematic perfection to do its own thing, the weight of adapting a comic masterpiece constraining its ability to be sidesplittingly funny in 2024. It’s a lovable but overly reverential approach to a film classic that’s sturdy enough to withstand a braver spin.
Noel Coward Theatre, until 25 January 2025; Bord Gais Energy Theatre, Dublin, 5-22 February 2025