Review: DR. STRANGELOVE, Noel Coward Theatre

It must be hard to do superpower satire the day after a candidate for November’s presidential election is on television saying, unironically, “I’m the opposite of a Nazi”. 

So it is probably wise of Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley not to essay a thoroughgoing update of Stanley Kubrick’s celebrated film (aside from a few fleeting references, more directed more towards the Soviet leader than the American) but 'merely' to recreate the movie on stage. That may be a safer creative choice, offering fewer opportunities for disappointed diehard fans to kvetch or identify the instances when the jokes were not as good, but the raw material is so very strong that its power is barely diminished 60 years on. Exposure at an impressionable age to Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote convinced me that all texts exist in in a specific time and, in consequence, changing the time changes the text. The show needs nothing new in order to be new.

For all my promises to myself, the moment Steve Coogan appeared on stage, I was comparing him to Peter Sellers. Unfairly? Certainly. Unprofessionally? Possibly. Uniquely? Improbably. That’s what all but the most disciplined of the audience will be doing (except those who are using Alan Partridge as the comparator) and something that the production leans into with its sets. 

Hildegard Bechtler channels Ken Adam’s dazzling design work with a loving recreation of The War Room, General Ripper’s office and, supported by Akhila Krishnan’s projections, the cockpit of a B52. It’s so evocative that the fact that it’s in colour and not black and white occasionally jars you back to the present day!

There’s wonderful work wherever you look on stage. Giles Terera holds General Turgidson’s bloodlust in check just sufficiently to avoid toppling into caricature, his eyes worth the ticket price alone (some of it at least). Tony Jayawardena gives us a sardonic, cynically fatalist Russian ambassador, Bakov, who appears to be working for the current occupant of The Kremlin rather than Leonid Brezhnev. Who knew in 1964 that we’d be feeling nostalgic about that slab-faced monster in 2024?

Best of the rest (a cruel phrase, but this is very much Coogan’s show) is John Hopkins who gets the cigar-chomping, bodily fluids obsessed Jack D Ripper dead right. He’s the conspiracy theorist who pushes the button down (okay, launches his wing of bombers towards Russian targets) and sets in train the prepostrous, panicky attempts to recall them. He’s narcissistic, psychotic and insane - and truly terrifying in his plausibility. 

What then of the star of the show? Coogan’s energy is astonishing, on stage more or less the whole time, save the (very) quick changes required to appear and reappear in four roles, he draws on every element of his comic heritage from voices, to pratfalls, to character work, to farce. If the script needs a fistful of clunky devices to get him into the shadowy backdrop only to have him return swiftly as somebody else, it’s worth it for the platform it gives for his virtuosity.

Inevitably, there is some variation in the quality of those performances. Weakest is Captain Mandrake, the RAF man attached to Ripper, frantically trying to find and then communicate the recall codes to the Pentagon. The stiff upper lipped officer, all British pragmatism and decency, doesn’t quite ring true, possibly because the voice, and hence the pointless gravitas, isn’t quite there, compensated by a slight overegging of the slapstick.

He’s more successful as the hapless President Muffley, a middle-manager surrounded by unhinged alpha-males aroused by the chance to play with their toys at long last. He also has plenty of fun with the stetson-wearing pilot, TJ Kong, flying in under the radar to give Ivan a bloody nose come what may. We’ve already heard many of the movie’s best lines, so we’re primed for its most iconic image in the denouement and it doesn’t disappoint.

Coogan is at the peak of his powers as Dr Strangelove himself, the German scientist smuggled out of The Reich to work for NASA - just like Wilhelm von Braun. Affecting a camp accent under an absurd Andy Warholish wig and with his gloved right-hand telling the truths his tongue struggles to conceal, he is the centre of attention whenever he wheels into sight. What those few in the house unfamiliar with the character will make of him, I cannot imagine - indeed, there’s probably a very funny review to be written by someone assuming the persona of a po-faced 21st century critic who has never seen the movie. The rest of us can delight in a masterful recreation of sublime comic acting, even if we do wince at the show's largely unmitigated, and depressingly relentless, raw misogyny.

There’s so much that could go wrong in executing this production, almost every scene has its elephant traps, but very little does, even for those keen to say “I told you so!” as a line, a character, a prop falls short of complete fidelity to its source. In that, it joins Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro in a trio of fine translations from screen to West End stage.

But the real acid test for the play is whether it can provoke laughter in the dark. And it does.

Dr. Strangelove at the Noel Coward Theatre until 25 January 2025

Photo Credits: Manuel Harlan