Theatre review: Dr. Strangelove

Welp, October's been a busy theatrical month for me and certainly one with a certain prevailing tone - the odd dud among a very high rate of great shows, but good or bad there's definitely been a pretty dark side to everything I've seen. Even the funnier shows have had a touch of bleakness to them, so it's fitting that I end on the play with easily the biggest hit rate of laughs this month; but it gets them from the total annihilation of all life on earth. A long-awaited West End event - tickets went on sale over a year in advance - Armando Iannuci and Sean Foley adapt Stanley Kubrick's Cold War satire Dr. Strangelove, with Steve Coogan one-upping Peter Sellers in the film by playing all four roles Sellers had originally been slated to play: Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and the titular character, a German scientist who's definitely glad to have changed sides after the War - the fact that his bionic right arm keeps trying to do a Nazi salute is neither here nor there.

The paranoia of the period has been revisited a lot recently - possibly because it's mirrored so much nowadays, but spread out into multiple conspiracy theories and movements rather than a single East vs West showdown - and it's a paranoia distilled into the character of General Ripper (John Hopkins) who, after starting out suspicious of fluoride in the water, has graduated to being convinced the USSR is attacking.

Unfortunately he has the nuclear codes, and has taken it upon himself to launch several bombs on Russia, before cutting off all communication with his superiors. Meanwhile the President meets with his Generals in the Pentagon War Room to try and find a way to stop the attack, or at least negotiate with his Russian counterpart to minimise any retaliations. But as Dr. Strangelove informs him things are even worse than he thinks - Russia won't just nuke American cities, but has developed a Doomsday Machine that will immediately render the planet uninhabitable.

With imposing, quickly changing sets from Hildegard Bechtler, complemented by Akhila Krishnan's projections and Chris Fisher's illusions, plus Ben and Max Ringham's dramatic soundscape, there's no question this looks and sounds impressive. But the real success of the play lies where it should, in Iannucci's witty version of the film's comic exchanges, and the speed and comic timing that Foley's production brings to them. The first big setpiece sets the tone as Ripper sets out the impenetrable logic of his actions: The Russians will launch a, so sneaky in fact that the complete absence of any evidence that it's actually happening is incontrovertible proof that it is. In one of the more low-key, offstage horrors of the story, his men all end up killing each other because the fact that the person next to them is clearly someone they've known for years, only proves that the Russians' disguises are flawless.

This kind of absurd logic is what the play is built on, with Giles Terera as Air Force General Turgidson getting to skewer American jingoism and one-upmanship - whether it's his ongoing feuds with his Army counterpart Staines (Ben Deery) over whose branch of the military is better, or his getting carried away with excitement about how Kong, the pilot every bit as insane as Ripper, is showing American excellence by carrying out precisely the mission they all desperately need him to abort.

There's a touch of the Commedia dell'arte to Russian Ambassador Bakov (Tony Jayawardena) being distracted by wanting someone to bring him his dinner, while one of the more likeable running gags sees a Canadian General (Tom Kelsey) just happy to have anyone remember he's there. Iannucci and Foley's script does acknowledge that, in keeping with the period it's set in, the show's a sausagefest, but they do at least make that cast a bit more diverse, and sneak in a brief, surreal appearance by Vera Lynn (Penny Ashmore.)

Coogan has a blast with his multiple roles, with the use of recordings and doubles to allow him to be on stage with himself (from the slips you can see when he gets sneakily replaced, but that's fun to spot in itself.) I did think in the first half that the quick-changes weren't all that quick, and suspect this might have been deliberate to give the audience one idea of how long it took to swap characters: It makes it all the more surprising when they speed up in the second act and Coogan reappears seconds later in a different costume.

I honestly can't remember if I've seen Kubrick's original film: I feel like I have, a long time ago, but it's so iconic and key scenes of it so frequently shown on TV that I can't be sure if I remember them from seeing them in context or not. Either way it's too long to be able to say how much the production adds to the original, other than the added energy of watching this convoluted, fast-paced dialogue being delivered live. But that's certainly enough; and as the show develops and the story becomes about automated systems set up to do a certain job that they'll carry out with their own internal logic regardless of what the effects will be, you can see why the last couple of years' concerns about AI make this topical for even more reasons. Regardless of the worries it reflects in the outside world though, while you're in the Noël Coward it's the most entertaining Apocalypse I've seen in a long time.

Dr. Strangelove by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, based on the film by Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George, is booking until the 25th of January at the Noël Coward Theatre; then from the 5th to the 22nd of February at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin.

Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan.