Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satire, about cold war brinkmanship tipping into nuclear conflict, seemed to be a vehicle for Peter Sellers to showboat in three central roles. It might have ended up like Carry On … to Armageddon but with the combined genius of Kubrick and Sellers rocketed into the film canon.
It takes a confident – foolish? – team to tamper with a work quite so revered, and so suited to the screen. How, for instance, do you turn the legendary scene of a pilot riding a careering nuclear warhead into credible theatre? This production achieves the dubious feat of turning an edgy, absurdist story into broad entertainment with accessible laughs, along with a few topical references and excellent performances all round.
Armando Iannucci and director Sean Foley’s adaptation follows the story faithfully: a mad-dog American general, Jack Ripper (John Hopkins), has gone rogue and initiated a nuclear attack so the US’s elder statesmen convene for a crisis meeting with the Soviet ambassador (Tony Jayawardena) in tow.
Steve Coogan plays the titular German scientist, a Royal Air Force captain trying to stop Ripper from destroying the world, and the US president. He betters Sellers, in number at least, by also taking on a fourth part for which Sellers initially aimed – the gung-ho pilot who rides the iconic warhead.
King Charles is channelled for Coogan’s upper-class English captain, to slightly wooden effect, and his Nixon-like president is an anodyne plot functionary. His Stetson-wearing major, who rides his B-52 as if he is at a rodeo, is more fun while Coogan’s Dr Strangelove is so good to be (whisper it) funnier than Sellers’ stiffer, sinister version. There is clever use of screens when these characters need to be in the same room but, as the in-person switches get faster, the way Coogan juggles them so seamlessly is remarkable.
There are other likable elements: Hildegard Bechtler’s set accommodates scenes that swing from panicked war room conversations to the cockpits of the B-52s heading to Moscow and the military base in which Ripper is holed up. The set cracks apart and opens up worlds magnificently with projections.
The script sometimes glints with the humorous intelligence of Iannucci’s The Thick of It (there is great war jargon with words like “pre-taliate”). At other times, however, it is pedestrian or soft in its satire. This might be because the adaptation follows the film so faithfully that it feels dated, the stakes low. In the 1960s, the Cuban missile crisis had terrified the world and the film exposed the lunacy of the mutually assured destruction theory. This story’s absurdist slide into nuclear war contains a historic fear for a present world in which warfare seems surreptitiously conducted through AI and social media disinformation.
There are relatively few modern-day references added (the possible bombing of Jerusalem and the amphetamine-fuelled actions of a Russian premier whose enemies “accidentally” fall off balconies etc).
Something in the men’s war hunger rings of our current political strongmen. Hopkins is an antic, Uzi-toting highlight and Giles Terera, as the gum-chewing General Turgidson, is good at presenting a tempered front to his war lust. What is impressive is the control in these performances, and in the script, so that the production does not spiral into flat farce.
The war room has no women (thankfully the one barely clad woman of the film has been excised) but this feels blandly faithful. There is satire around gender parity in the room, but gender inversion in the casting might have offered up something more original and fun. Then again, if this show is anything, it is fun. And Coogan fans most certainly get bang for their buck.
• At Noël Coward theatre, London, until 25 January. Then at Bord Gáis Energy theatre, Dublin, 5-22 February.
