Review: Steve Coogan Stars Four Times In Explosive Nuclear War Comedy

"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!"

Perhaps it was only a matter of time before Armando Iannucci — the Svengali of satire behind The Thick of It and Veep — turned his hand to an adaptation of Stanley Kubrick's bleakly hilarious nuclear war comedy, Dr Strangelove.  

The story — in which all-out war is triggered against Russia by a deranged American general obsessed with protecting his "bodily fluids" — is a great glossy mortuary slab of gallows humour. As a sausagefest of presidents, generals and ambassadors hamfistedly scramble to stop armageddon, they only make things worse — the world quickly spiralling into self-destruct mode. The fact they're all men speaks volumes.

Much of the dour dialogue from the 1964 movie is retained in this production, but given the extended running time, Iannucci and co have fun beefing things up. Take the stark scene where Pentagon top brass haggle over a city to offer up to the Russians as a sacrificial lamb. When it's suggested Stoke might be blasted to smithereens, a loud cheer rises from the audience.

Steve Coogan is not so much the star of this show, as the stars. The chameleon-like Peter Sellers played three of the main characters in Kubrick's movie (the sober-but-ineffectual Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, exasperated President Merkin Muffley and eponymous Nazi screwball, Strangelove). Sellers was also supposed to be Major T.J. Kong but a sprained ankle put paid to that. Here, in a display of (literal) one-upmanship, Coogan takes on the Kong role too — a cottony Texan drawl recalling George Dubya. Given Kong's eagerness to rain down warheads on foreign countries, perhaps the similarity is intentional.

Coogan's Dr Strangelove — the not-so-closeted Nazi scientist with automatically heil-Hitlering limbs — is a camper, sassier take. He looks like the late Paul O' Grady, has the accent of Bruno and is quite rightly the highlight of the play. Just as in the film, you feel there's so much more beneath the surface of this bizarre character. Iannucci fleshes him out marginally more (a smidge of a backstory suggests he smashed his own arm and leg in a self-imposed experiment) but you still feel shortchanged by his role in the overall narrative. But, though Coogan's four-for-the-price-of-one tour de force never quite nudges the rib-tickling nuance of Peter Sellers, it's an impressive carry-on. There are some clever switch-arounds to boot.

It's a tired old trope to say a decades-old story is 'just as relevant today' but it's difficult not to equate the lunkheaded 'nuke now, ask questions later' mentality of characters like Jack D. Ripper (delivered with gravelly aplomb by John Hopkins) with what we've witnessed in real life lately. In 1964, the thought of madmen with clownish hair/surnames pulling strings/pushing buttons from the Pentagon might've seemed far-fetched. But just as reality has overtaken The Thick of It and Veep, you worry it might be about to do a number on Dr Strangelove too.

Come 6 November, the laughs from the Noël Coward's auditorium might be a little more strained.

Dr Strangelove, Noël Coward Theatre, until 25 January 2025