Note – spoilers throughout.
I always said it was a bad idea.
To be fair, I also said if anyone had a chance of pulling it off, it was Sean Foley, Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan, so I was prepared to give Dr Strangelove a chance. Plenty of beloved properties have been successfully reinvented over the years. The stage version can’t be the movie, arguably shouldn’t be the movie. Could it be successful on its own terms?
Ehhh… not really.
It’s not a failure, not by any means and Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern and Peter George’s plot is still absolutely bomb-proof (pun intended) so if you’ve never been told this story before, there’s a good chance you’ll be in its spell, have a good time with the ripe performances and admire the bravura staging. But if you have even a passing familiarity with the original – or possibly even if you don’t – it’s hard to look past a series of surprising shortcomings. I think of these as forced errors, unforced errors and tonal blunders.
On screen, Peter Sellers plays three roles. Neurotic about his ability to summon up the Texan accent for Major Kong, he got himself signed off the picture after a minor accident on his first day in the cockpit, and Slim Pickens magnificently took over. That leaves one Peter Sellers on the air force base and two in the war room, which Kubrick achieves entirely with cutting and body doubles, never even trying to show both faces in the same frame. That luxury isn’t available to the stage team, and so various holes are introduced in the war room scenes where Coogan has to nip off stage, replaced on a spurious pretext and the change covered by a fairly unconvincing stand-in.
These pretexts distract from the action, the scenes lose momentum, and the fact that two key characters can’t talk to each other in the story’s final moments is a huge problem, but these are all forced errors. I don’t have any better solutions, and it wouldn’t make commercial sense to have another actor play the president, the least showy but most central of the Sellers parts.
We actually first see Strangelove via an early 1960s Zoom call, and when the Germanic scientist agrees to come and join him in person, Coogan as the president comments that that would make life easier “in some ways”. That’s a lovely joke, pressingly lightly on the fourth wall where others might have stampeded through it. It’s a rare moment of restraint, in a script which elsewhere feels like a child has gone through the movie screenplay, scribbling silly comments in the margins. In the movie, Mandrake bristles at Keenan Wynn, clocking his name badge and tartly observing “Colonel Bat Guano, if that really is your name.” Here Coogan just goes ahead and says “Guano? Like bird shit?” It’s such a good joke that we get Turgidson repeating the exact same words some moments later.
Now, stage and screen are very different animals, and there is an argument that the gag rate needs to be higher and the jokes need to be broader if the audience is there in person. And if the whole room had been rocking with laughter, I would have to admit that even though the vulgarity doesn’t seem to me to be an improvement on the elegant wit of the original screenplay, the piece was doing the job it set out to do. But only about one joke in five ever really landed the night I was there, with most punchlines met with soft chuckles, or total silence. If you’re committing to making this a wall-to-wall gagfest, then it needs to be Book of Morman funny, not middling student revue funny.
And these tonal lapses extend to the performances too. Coogan is quite bad as Mandrake, the part where you’d imagine he’d be most at home, playing him as a rubbery cross between Prince Charles and Alan Partridge, the script decorated with sub-PG Wodehouse British-ism like “Bally bingo bollocks” and other such drivel. That’s a shame as John Hopkins’s General Ripper is one of the highlights of the play, with just a little Donald Trump mixed into Sterling Hayden’s cigar-chomping lunacy. Coogan also struggles with Merkin Muffley, which is a better performance, but the comedy value in the president’s egg-headed earnestness seems to elude him and he badly muffs the hilarious phone call with Moscow, such a highlight of the original movie.
Once again, he’s paired with a brilliant performance from one of the supporting actors. Giles Terera, the original UK Aaron Burr in Hamilton, is terrific as Turgidson, effortlessly finding the tone which seems to be eluding so many others. Tony Jayawardena is pretty good as Ambassador Bakov too (but what was wrong with de Sadski?). Coogan is best by far as Strangelove himself, and here for once all of the pieces seem to come together, as the actor’s performance is neither a rendition of what Sellers did, nor a reaction against it, the new backstory adds rather than detracts, and Iannucci and Foley find a new way for this character to be funny.
If this was where we ended up, with some tonal lapses and some forced errors, I’d be happier to recommend this, but the unforced errors are completely confounding. Chief among these is the stuff on the B52. This is the least successful element of the whole evening. The projections are pretty, but by presenting the whole plane onstage, the production never puts us inside the cockpit, so there’s never a feeling of claustrophobia. And the two other pilots are woefully underwritten. But far more damaging are the plot changes introduced here.
A good screenplay is a piece of architecture and it’s hard to make one change without introducing problems elsewhere, and if you aren’t careful, it’s easy to get lost. Here, the function and the purpose of the doomsday device is muddled, with the first half making it clear that the machine has to be triggered manually, and the possibility existing of a deal to be struck whereby America destroys one of its own cities to stay the Premier’s hand (shades of Fail Safe). Only in the second half is it made clear that the whole purpose of the device is that it triggers itself automatically. And for no good reason, they cut the line “The Premier loves surprises.” This introduces confusion and gains us nothing.
But worse is to come, as the role of the OPE/POE “recall code” also gets garbled during the interval. In the first half, we’re told, in lines repeated verbatim from the movie, that the plane’s radios won’t receive at all unless messages are preceded by the appropriate three-letter-sequence (known only to the pilots and General Ripper). However, when we’re in the cockpit, this is changed to the sequence “POE” is a coded order to turn back, and rather than have the CRM discriminator destroyed when the plane is hit by the missile, it’s working fine, but Major Kong elects to ignore the order. And that change is fatal.
The American military was so worried by what the movie might do to American morale that they insisted a disclaimer be placed at the beginning. In my eyes, that only makes what follows more convincing. The nuclear deterrent is vulnerable to a single person making one bad decision and the weapons at our disposal are so devastating that the consequence could be the extinction of the human race.
Except here, where is takes two people to make bad decisions. And that isn’t as potent. Not by half.
Elsewhere, the character of Faceman adds very little, and Mark Hadfield is working way too hard. A laborious and relentlessly unfunny subplot about the Ambassador wanting fish does eventually lead us to a pretty great visual punchline, and – as noted – the production design is amazing. Most effective are probably the scenes between Ripper and Mandrake, as the physical effects and sound design really do summon up the bullets flying and Hopkins and Coogan play off each other very well. But time and again, the changes made to the script detract rather than add, sometimes in minor irritating ways, sometimes in major fatal ways.
I think the real missed opportunity here is the original ending. As written and initially shot, when the bombs began falling, the war room was to break into an enormous custard pie fight. Kubrick cut this (and destroyed the footage), feeling that it didn’t quite work to escalate from nuclear annihilation to prat falls – and he was very likely right. But onstage, the calculus is different. The bombs don’t feel as viscerally real – but the custard pies would. The actual ending isn’t bad, as a ghostly Vera Lynn transports us to a musical afterlife, but I can’t help but imagine what a more slapstick finale might have looked like. A little bit of sweaty messiness might have helped this very slick but often sterile production gain a bit more intensity.
