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.
