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.
