The week in theatre: Dr Strangelove; Barcelona; Quiet Songs – review
Oh come on chaps, you can do – have done – so much better than this. Steve Coogan stars, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, with Foley directing. Covetable comic talents have set themselves not to invent but to replicate. What a waste of imagination.
Opening less than 18 months after the Cuban missile crisis, the 1964 satire was motored by charismatic alarm. Its vision of a bloke (there is no she anywhere near power) getting his hands on the nuclear bomb and going off his trolley offered wisecracks and warning, tremendous quasi-documentary footage of aircraft and war rooms, looming, grainy, flashlit faces. Plus, of course, a triple dose of an eyebrow waggling Peter Sellers, as American president, twitching British airforce officer and bonkers scientist.
There is no lack of accomplishment, but an extreme lack of adventurousness: a show about risk itself takes none
Coogan is well up to the challenge of multitasking – and actually adds to the tally of parts, taking on the role of the pilot who straddles the nuclear missile. He cannot, as Sellers did, bring two of his selves face to face, but everything else is almost too easy for him. The scientist is his best creation: weirdly, he brings some wistfulness to the demon; it is as if he is hovering, slightly puzzled, above his own face. He gets good support from Giles Terera and John Hopkins as – oh yes – Generals Turgidson and Ripper, and a rousing Vera Lynn turn from Penny Ashmore.
There is no lack of accomplishment, but an extreme lack of adventurousness: a show about risk itself takes none. The wild sweep of the movie can’t be captured but the script stays close to the original with only a few tweaks: the bottom-patting misogyny has gone, and a nod is made to Trump denials. Hildegard Bechtler’s set and Akhila Krishnan’s projection design grandly reproduce the war room (“no fighting in here”); a spectacular plane was greeted with a cheer on press night.
Aspects look stale. Those jokey names: Russian Ambassador Bakov, the boggle-eyed Colonel Bat Guano. The expostulating about commie plots. The fact that Strangelove has to keep – Basil Fawlty-style – suppressing a Nazi salute. Any thrill of premonition has long passed. This doesn’t look like a visionary glimpse at a future madness but a tepid cartoon of what is actually happening.
It was a week of gifts being underused. Why is the inspired director Lynette Linton staging Barcelona? This star-driven piece of flim-flam is pretty much the opposite of the work with which she has lit up stages from the Donmar to the National Theatre, and ignited the Bush, which she leaves as artistic director next year; her marvellous production of Benedict Lombe’s Shifters preceded Barcelona at the Duke of York’s.
The UK premiere of Bess Wohl’s play features Lily Collins from Emily in Paris and Álvaro Morte from Money Heist briefly encountering each other in a strangely empty Barcelona apartment block overlooking the Sagrada Família. She is on her hen night; he is a solitary hunk. Paris is further from Barcelona than Collins is from Emily. She giggles and squeals, totters in a silver onesie on one glittering sandal (she’s lobbed the other at her companion), throws up, calls him Manolo though his name is Manuel, and boasts about her pioneer ancestors: she is American. He smoulders and shrugs, criticises the invasion of Iraq and plays her a meaningful piece of Puccini: he is a Madrileño.
Both actors have little to do other than present themselves and slightly inflect the first impression of flat-packed characters. She turns out not to be quite as silly as she seems (that would be hard) and considerably kinder. He has reason to be more troubled than he appears. Each cajoles – or forces – the other into making a decision that will completely change their life, but the emotional temperature is so low and the changes achieved so easily that they might as well be switching television channels.
Frankie Bradshaw’s snug design of worn wood and curved tiles, with light gleaming through glass, is made strange by Jai Morjaria’s shifts of lighting: suddenly white, suddenly warmed to yellow. Yet the range of feeling remains small: from giggle to whimper.
The first time I saw Ruth Negga on stage has remained with me as one of my most memorable early sightings of a young actor. In 2009, when she appeared in Phèdre, with Helen Mirren in the title role, she glowed everyone off the stage of the National. It is terrific to see her back in the theatre: like Carey Mulligan, who has the same apparently effortless transmitting quality, she is often written about as if she had only ever appeared on screen.
Negga is remarkable in Quiet Songs, though I wish she were appearing in something that stretched her beyond rapt absorption. Finn Beames wrote, composed and directs the hour-long event, part trance, part tale, which received the 2024 Oxford Samuel Beckett Theatre Trust award, given to support new practitioners who are undertaking innovative performance; previous winners include the glorious You Me Bum Bum Train, due, hurrah, to reappear in London shortly.
A gay adolescent is bullied, while their voice is breaking: “Just when they are given words to use against me my body’s taking mine.” Negga appears in school uniform of blazer and trousers (the badge is, significantly, a shield), first curled up in foetal position, unwinding to spin an alarming history. She moves slowly, speaks softly, muted by unhappiness. Quiet Songs has some of the marks of an antique avant garde – the nameless central figure called Boy, hushed darkness, use of the historic present. It also has a startling element. The former Royal Opera House armourer Zoe Phillips collaborated on the project. To conjure the sound of a breaking voice, and a fractured heart, weapons become musical instruments – and instruments weapons. Swords are struck by an onstage quartet of violin, viola, cello and double bass (Fra Rustumji, Chihiro Ono, Hoda Jahanpour and Thea Sayer) who also fence with their bows – sending clouds of rosin into the air. The images are memorable but in isolation too studied: they belong in a larger drama.
Star ratings (out of five)
Dr Strangelove ★★
Barcelona ★★
Quiet Songs ★★★
• Dr Strangelove is at the Noël Coward theatre, London, until 25 January
• Barcelona is at the Duke of York’s theatre, London, until 11 January
