Dr Strangelove – a Review by Brandon Williams

Released in 1964, Dr Strangelove has become a touchstone of cinematic black comedy. Directed by Stanley Kubrick and boasting some of the finest work of Peter Sellers’ career, – where he played three separate roles – it follows the chaotic battle of diplomacy and brinkmanship that ensues after a rogue US general orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Adapting such a well revered movie for the stage is precisely the challenge that presented director Sean Foley and his co-writer Armando Iannucci, with Steve Coogan taking the hefty task of playing the three characters Sellers did in the film as well as one additional role.

If anyone has earned the stripes to adapt Strangelove, it’s Iannucci, whose career is full of work that spins comedy from the belly of governments, such as in The Thick of It and The Death of Stalin. But why adapt Dr Strangelove? Well, it’s perhaps because, in an age where nuclear weapons are not only unfortunately still in existence, the precarious nature of geopolitics in 2025 means the possibility of mutually assured destruction still lurks in the shadows behind the headlines.

Coogan delivers an excellent central performance. His ability to slide seamlessly between his four roles is thoroughly impressive, especially given the range of personalities he inhabits in such a quick turnaround. His President Merkin Muffley isn’t quite on par with the mild-mannered yet determined turn of Sellers, but he particularly excels as the stifled Captain Mandrake and the eccentric Dr Strangelove – the latter of which gets the strongest laughs. Giles Terera also does some great work as a more straight-laced General Turgidson, the kind that George C. Scott may have originally intended to do.

Speaking of seamless, the choreography regarding the interchanging sets – designed by Olivier Award winner Hildegard Bechtler – allows the story to keep up the frantic pace of imminent nuclear warfare. The sets themselves are minimalist but maintain the confined feeling of the film’s settings, adding to the sense that the fate of the world is in the hands of a select few men cobbled together in small rooms, rather than on the battlefields, where most of the characters would have cut their military teeth.

With Dr Strangelove, Iannucci and Foley find themselves in the Catch-22 of adaptations: stay true to the original, or use it as a loose framework to explore a different version of the story. This production is quite happy to sit in the middle.

Within the context of it being a film adaptation, the play does offer fun sprinkles of original material, such as the concept of ‘pretaliating’ before the Soviets have time to retaliate and the sacrificial bombings of Jerusalem or Stoke-on-Trent. However, there is probably more room for the writers to do their own thing than they afford themselves. The film Dr Strangelove, after all, is a loose, comedic adaptation of a serious novel, Red Alert.

It remains a highly pertinent piece of work and this production manages to keep the same sense of enjoyability despite the subject matter. Given over 60 years have passed since the initial film release, there is some morbid curiosity as to what this story set in 2025 would look like. Maybe such a thing does not bear thinking about, but if Dr Strangelove asks us to do anything it is to embrace the absurdity.