You wait years for Steve Coogan to appear on stage, and he turns up in four roles at once. Even Peter Sellers managed only three in Kubrick’s era-defining masterpiece about the logical absurdity of the nuclear deterrent; Coogan takes the fourth role of Major Kong, alongside that of the English officer Mandrake, the US president Merkin Muffley and the gleefully ambivalent Nazi visionary Dr Strangelove himself in Sean Foley’s production, which arrives at a point in which the international nuclear entente surely feels as fragile as ever before.
Yet Kubrick’s 1964 film, produced in the shadow of the Cuban missile crisis, was a deliciously barbed existential farce. Foley, who as a former member of The Right Size has a background in physical comedy, serves up a knockabout production marked by a contrasting refusal to take its subject seriously. With Coogan on full power, this is not necessarily always a problem.
As the increasingly beleaguered Mandrake, trapped with the deranged US General Ripper (John Hopkins), who has issued a squadron of B52s with rogue orders to launch a nuclear attack on Russia, and by some system quirk is the only one with the recall code, Coogan parades a very English, upright form of panic, in which bluff understatement is in exquisite disproportion to the crisis. As Muffley, watching over the unfolding disaster, he exudes a helpless, ruffled calm. As the physical tic-ridden Stangelove, he dials up the schlocky weirdness to the max, helped in certain scenes by appearing via a malfunctioning TV screen. And as the gung-ho fighter pilot Kong, who stages his own minor coup in the cockpit, he rabidly embellishes Kubrick’s characterisation of nuclear war as a male erotic fantasy.
Yet if Foley’s production isn’t willing to recreate the film point by point (and how could it?), then what is it instead? It’s a question the show never adequately answers, trapped between the film’s formidable legacy and an inability to recreate it anew theatrically. Hildegard Bechtler’s set exemplifies the problem – there’s the odd nod to the original, notably the War Room’s circular overhead light, but it settles mainly for perfunctory designs in regulation 1960s grey: the War Room, the office, in the second act a vast bomber jet, past which fly projected imagery of the Russian tundra. A designer such as Bob Crowley might have found a way to translate Ken Adam’s original stark chiaroscuro into a fresh theatrical language; instead we get dull bright lighting that flattens everything it touches.
Moreover, co-adaptor Armando Iannucci’s presence extends either to extraneous riffs on original gags, or to occasional clumsy attempts at updating, notably the awkward and entirely unnecessary acknowledgment of the fact that, in the 1960s, there were no women in the room. There’s more egregious clumsiness elsewhere: Foley gets round Coogan appearing as two people in the same scene by twice using the same body-double device for Muffley. Once is fun, twice is careless.
Like a stealth bomber, Coogan leaves all other performances in his wake – not even a misused Giles Terera, as the brawny chump General Turgidson, can compete – but ultimately offers four impersonations rather than four particularised performances. Evidently, this production has been built around him, rather than out of a necessity to recreate it for a generation caught, once again, in the panicky cross hairs of a possible nuclear war.
With Trump possibly looking like being in charge once again of the nuclear button, one could argue that geopolitics has tipped over into sheer sickly entertainment, an argument that Foley’s production certainly seems to endorse. Yet to suggest Dr Stangelove gains its power because of its proximity to real life events misses the point: the film is less a satire of geopolitical circumstance than a deadly ironic comedy of human fallibility. The laughter should come at sickening cost. Foley, by contrast, just wants you to have a good time.
Until Jan 25. Tickets: 0344 482 5151; drstrangelove.com