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.

Theatre review: Pandemonium

Having had huge hits on TV and film, Armando Iannucci is taking on the West End next year, but before that he warms up with something a lot more intimate in scale, and very much in his traditional wheelhouse of topical political satire: Pandemonium, which Patrick Marber directs in Soho Theatre's main house, is a retelling of the Boris Johnson years in government, particularly, of course, the Covid pandemic. The main styles it emulates are Jacobean and Restoration satire, with a generous dose of Shakespearean pastiche, although it takes in influences all the way from Mediaeval Mystery plays to Ubu Roi. Taking its cue from Johnson's childhood ambition to be "World King," the central character is called Orbis Rex (Paul Chahidi,) a childlike disruptor figure who opens the show convinced that the gods have anointed him as one of their own.