'GRAMMen, you can't fight here, this is the war room! It's actually a rehearsal space on a fall afternoon, but let's not make noise. This is where Steve Coogan and the rest of the cast stumble upon a new stage version of Stanley Kubrick's 1964 satire. Doctor Strange Love. Watching over them are their director Sean Foley and his co-adapter Armando Iannucci, who together resemble the tall, burly bricklayer and his short, grinning partner.
The cast walks past a revolving wooden stage, still unpainted, to reveal the office of General Ripper, played by the imperative Sterling Hayden on screen and John Hopkins here. As the scene plays out, Ripper barks into the phone at the group's captain, Lionel Mandrake, played by Coogan, who weakly holds a computer printout in front of his face.
Ripper's mental breakdown sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that begins with the launching of American missiles into the Soviet Union. The rest of this abysmal black comedy follows the attempts to intercept or defeat these seemingly unstoppable nuclear weapons as Armageddon looms. Columbia Pictures was thrilled to see Peter Sellers in various costumes in Kubrick's 1962 film. The adaptation of Lolita stipulated that the actor would play multiple roles. He played Mandrake, the conniving American President Merkin Muffley, and the sinister nuclear brainiac Dr. Strangelove. He was also lined up for a fourth role: Major Kong, the B-52 pilot eventually played by Slim Pickens, who is remembered for driving a warship like it was a warship, but an ankle injury deserted him.
Coogan, often compared to Sellers, missed out on playing the Pink Panther star. A 2004 biopic (which Geoffrey Rush promoted him to) is better than his idol and spans all four parts. One of the photos that hangs on the studio wall today shows him riding a missile like Major Kong in a Stetson. “Steve playing all those roles adds a edgy quality to the story,” Foley says as he and Iannucci take a seat in this basement room that doesn't look like a nuclear bunker in London.
Adding to the complexity is the fact that some of Coogan's characters appear together in the same scene. Muffley and Dr. Strangelove, for example, are in the war room at the same time. “Yeah,” Foley says, swallowing air through his teeth. “Can you tell us how to do that?”
A small detail. The main thing is that the sensitivity of the original remains the same. As novelist Kazuo Ishiguro wrote, the film is “a remarkable combination of things that should not go together…Kubrick creates a dark vision of nuclear war and combines it with outsider and humor.”
It's not like that. Kubrick was adapting Peter George's thriller Red Alert when it occurred to him that the climax of his apocalyptic scene should be treated inappropriately. The Cuban missile crisis was recently eased when he recruited Terry Southern, the author of the comic novel The Magic Christian (which Sellers gave to Kubrick) to tease the funny side of the impending disaster.
Selling it as a laugh-out-loud presented another kind of challenge. Mo Rothman, president of Columbia Pictures, told Kubrick: “The advertising industry is having a hard time figuring out how to promote a comedy about the destruction of the planet.” Some critics found the film too strange to like. Bosley Crowther in the New York Times called it “wrong and sick.” Foley now says: “We can only hope.”
Any shock value is definitely diminished. “I doubt the public will say, 'You shouldn't joke about that,'” Ainucci says. “I hope this work serves as a reminder of what is at stake in all of this. We view people like Trump as a form of entertainment, while the decisions they make in power have global consequences. It's not just 30-second clips on TikTok.
Both have loved Kubrick's films their entire lives. Iannucci was born two months before its opening. “So he's not in the premiere,” Foley notes. “I saw it for the first time on video and I loved it,” says Ainucci, who created the political comedies Veep and The Thick of It and directed The Death of Stalin.
He also co-created the 1990s spoof The Day Today, in which Chris Morris's Paxman-style host elevates a harmless matter from a peace treaty to a declaration of world war. That episode is pure Doctor Strangelove, a cinematic spin-off of The Thick of It on a loop, like the scene in which an American general uses a pink talking calculator to calculate the probability of a possible war.
“The American premiere of In the Loop had a Doctor Strangelove-type poster,” Ainucci recalls. “The French producers of The Death of Stalin told me they thought it had a strange feel to it. I've always admired things like Brazil or The Great Dictator: the idea of topics so immense that they can only be answered absurdly. Take for example the scene in Dr. Strangelove where Mandrake has to call the president to stop World War III, but he doesn't change. It's a great comedy situation.
Foley believes Dr. Strangelove is Kubrick's masterpiece. “I'm always interested in taking something clever and doing it in another medium,” he explains. “Even if it is a poisoned ship, people can say that you have destroyed it.” So far so good: Foley's stage versions of Ladykillers (in 2011) and Withnail and I (with which he ended his tenure as artistic director of the Birmingham Rep earlier this year) have been warmly received.
“What happens is that people don't know which bits are new and which ones are from the movie,” Ainucci says. “When Kubrick's estate looked at the script, there were lines where they had to go back and check whether they were in the picture or not. This is a good sign.
Some elements were crying out to be replaced. “The film is a satire of masculinity, power, politics and the arms race,” says Foley. “However, there is only one real female character: a bikini-clad secretary who has an affair with a commander.” Iannucci wins: “Other times,” he says.
“We don't think there's any way it could be performed today, but it would become an all-male show,” Foley continues. A solution emerged in the unlikely form of Vera Lynn, who provides We'll Meet Again with its bitterly ironic punchline, and who now appears in a role played by Benny Ashmore. “They are abandoning her in Russia,” Iannucci jokes.
If anyone needs a reminder that the real world is much more stable than what is shown on stage, the US elections are in the early stages and are sure to cause an extra chill. “The worse the world is, the better it is for the play,” Foley says.
And without that, there's the specter of Elon Musk, who, hell-bent on making the planet a more turbulent place, could have easily walked out of Doctor Strange's world. “You can have fun at Musk's expense,” Iannucci says. “But I find it alarming that those responsible for information give priority to rumors and lies that adapt to their vision.” In recent months he's been injecting musk whenever he can for the benefit of his nearly 700,000 followers on X. “Tell me on Twitter!” Gaelic slams his fist on the table in anger. It denies that it is carrying out any type of persistent campaign of annoyance against the owner of the platform. “I was sitting there one night, looking at it and saying, 'Oh, to hell with that.'”
The day we met, Taylor Swift supported Kamala Harris and signed a statement of support: “Childless cat girl.” Musk responded by tweeting: “Pretty Taylor… you win… I'll give you a baby…” Iannucci shook his head in dismay. “You say, 'What? Threaten to get someone pregnant? Do you think that since you run this company you can write whatever you want?
I ask him if he will book two tickets for Kasturi on opening night.
“There has to be a controlled vision,” he says. “Let's give it to him.”
