'Dr Strangelove' Review: Is Putting Kubrick’s Iconic Satire on Stage an Act of MADness?
“I’m always interested in taking something that’s brilliant and doing it in another medium,” theatre director Sean Foley told the Guardian, shortly before his adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 black comedy film, Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, opened in London’s West End. “Though it can be a poisoned chalice,” he added, “because people might say you’ve ruined it.”
Foley seemed to have given himself a fighting chance with this one – not only has he pulled off similar feats before (he recently directed Withnail and I at the Birmingham Rep to positive reviews), he has also co-adapted Dr Strangelove with Armando Iannucci, of Veep and The Thick of It, and recruited none other than Steve Coogan to stand in for the film’s star, Peter Sellers.
Is taking on one of the greatest satires ever made about political venality and human stupidity an act of homage or of hubris? No doubt its creators would claim homage. But, regretfully, now that I’ve seen it, I have my doubts.
If you have plans to see it yourself and want to keep your own doubts at bay for as long as possible, I would strongly advise that you do not – repeat: do not – do what I did, and prepare for your visit by watching the clearly insurmountable original two days before. Ideally it should be a fond and hazy memory (having watched it 10 years ago would be ideal). To deter you further from revisiting that masterpiece, let me remind you how it goes.
Kubrick’s film, loosely based on Peter George’s 1958 novel, Red Alert, with a script that was funnied up by Kubrick and Terry Southern, depicts a rapidly escalating nuclear catastrophe in which a terminally paranoid American General, Jack D Ripper, played by Sterling Hayden in the original film and John Hopkins in the play, initiates an allegedly retaliatory bomb attack on Russia.
The only person who twigs that the General is, in fact, mad and that the Russians have done nothing at all, is Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, a hapless RAF officer on an exchange programme, played with exquisite restraint by Sellers in the film, and by Coogan on stage, who is doing his ineffectual best to call the whole thing off.
Meanwhile, the President of the United States, Merkin Muffley, another Sellers/Coogan role, is engaged in an equally frustrating series of deliberations with his top-ranking political and military officials. They must work out whether it is better to try to call back their war planes – though nobody except Ripper knows the command code to abort – or to double down and bomb the Russians into oblivion before they get a chance to retaliate.
But it’s worse than that, as explained by Dr Strangelove, an increasingly uncloseted Nazi scientist now working for the US government (the last of Sellers’ roles in the film, though not Coogan’s in the play): the Russians, it seems, have built a Doomsday Machine, which, if triggered will detonate enough bombs to kill all life on Earth.
The last of the critical scenarios in hand – given more prominence in the film than in the stage adaption – is the interior of the B52 bomber that is on its way to Russia and determined to release its world-ending payload. Flying the plane is Major TJ “King” Kong, a role that Sellers was reluctant to play because he wasn’t sure his Texan accent was up to snuff, but from which he was excused anyway by an ankle injury, ceding the part to the swaggering cowboy Slim Pickens. Coogan apparently had fewer qualms, and takes on the Pickens role as well, rootin’ and tootin’ from the cockpit of set designer Hildegard Bechtler’s cleverly devised approximation of an airborne plane.
Clearly all this switching of roles in real time requires some tricksy stage craft, and one can’t help but watch in awe as Coogan pops up again and again – now in a wheelchair, now in a Stetson, now in a presidential wig. Though he sensibly chooses not to ape Sellers’ acting choices, the ones he does make do little to establish defining characterisations of his own.
The tortured Mandrake turns into a kind of stuffy King Charles; the tyranny of Kong’s Texan accent leads to a monotony of cadence; President Muffley is an indistinct presidential melee (a bit Reagan, a bit Biden, a bit Nixon, a bit Bush). Dr Strangelove is the most successful of the four, a kind of Andy Warhol-Karl Lagerfeld hybrid, with Coogan clearly more comfortable with the extremities of performance that that persona affords.
In order to turn Kubrick’s efficient 90-odd minute film into a length more expected for a play, perhaps providing justification for an interval in which to shift an ice cream or two, the original script has been padded – there’s no other word for it – with lines that are being touted as bringing new sociopolitical piquancy to the piece. There’s one about American presidential candidates not accepting election results, a mention of Jerusalem, another couple about gender equality, all disappointingly basic, yet nonetheless eliciting hoots from the audience.
In some cases the script additions are actively detrimental to the source material: in the film, Mandrake reveals himself to have been a prisoner of war in Japan, and then follows it with the devastatingly simple: “Strange thing is they make such bloody good cameras.” In the play, he continues to witter on about jade carvings and calligraphy, and the joke quietly dies.
The real problem of the exercise, though, is, as Foley feared, the choice of form. Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove is an inherently peculiar, ominous work, with stifling camera angles, chiaroscuro lighting and Ken Adam’s famous Bond-lair sets. At the simmering core of it are Sellers’ iconic performances which, like Dr Strangelove’s disobedient right arm, start quietly, before ratcheting up at alarming and surprising angles.
Kubrick was keen that the film stay as satire rather than farce – hence excising a final scene in which the War Room descends into a pie fight – but on stage there is no choice. As a play, a comedy’s success is adjudged by the mood in the room, with all the performative yes-I-too-got-the-joke! guffaws that can make the theatre both a convivial and an enervating experience. This production has opted for broader and flatter to ensure the reassuring laughs, but in doing so has neutralised Dr Strangelove’s threat.
Dr Strangelove is currently booking until 25 January at the Noel Coward Theatre, 85-88 St Martin's Ln, London WC2N 4AU
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