“With a scowl and a frown / we’ll keep our peckers down,” Noël Coward teased British doomsayers in his song “There Are Bad Times Just Around the Corner.” That was 1952. Since then, the furnace of the world has gotten hotter and closer. Our TV screens, our phones, even our watches broadcast carnage from every corner of the universe. We can’t hide from chaos. We are irradiated by it. We’re living it. Our ozone is terror, and terror kills thought.
That refusal to think—the desire to know nothing—is increasingly transparent in our politics and threatens to implode society from within. We’re in danger of scaring ourselves to death, which brings us neatly to the job description of satirists, whose laudable goal is to break through the culture’s psychic numbness, to both expose the moral and intellectual outrages of the moment and at the same time to risk delight.
Enter Armando Iannucci, a supremo of British satire, who has given the world The Thick of It, In the Loop, and Veep, and who has teamed up with the director Sean Foley to adapt for the West End Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 cinematic masterpiece, Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which Kubrick called “a nightmare comedy.”
The translation of a classic film from screen to stage has long been the retrograde commercial formula for musicals; it also has the same limiting imaginative effect on straight plays. In order to imagine the monstrous on film, Kubrick took his audience into a completely new, realistic, and grotesque world to create an extravaganza of stupidity. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling pictures,” said Flannery O’Connor, whose narrative shock tactics match Kubrick’s cinematic ones.
The essence of Kubrick’s subversive irony is to force awareness, a task that proves a poison chalice to the theatrical adapters. The paying West End customers are coming to see a story they already know. They are not being coaxed to think outside the box; they are inside it, avoiding the anxiety of the unknown. They are in a playhouse, but they are not at play.
When the curtain comes up on Dr. Strangelove, it’s an iron curtain meant also to suggest an aircraft hangar, on which is emblazoned “Peace Is Our Profession.” A posse of military men in full uniform march the width of the proscenium. They stand to attention, then deliver a choral version of “Try a Little Tenderness.” True, it’s not Kubrick’s erotic opening of a B-52 refueling in mid-air, where one plane seems to be shtupping the other, but it’s funny nonetheless.
The essence of Kubrick’s subversive irony is to force awareness, a task that proves a poison chalice to the theatrical adapters.
As Iannucci did in his 2017 film, The Death of Stalin, a merry-go-round of political purges which he expertly wrote and directed, Dr. Strangelove plays the same gleeful game of mashing up barbarity and frivolity. What makes this moment particularly piquant is the sight of the military-industrial complex being put through choreographer Lizzi Gee’s droll, well-drilled semaphore of gestures, straight arrows momentarily turned Village People. The absurdity gives the show a confident, effortless liftoff. The rest of the ride not so much.
The lunatic plot revolves around a paranoid, cigar-chewing General Jack D. Ripper (the bow-wow John Hopkins), certain that the Russians are sapping “the real American manly bodily fluids” with fluoride in the water supply, who goes rogue and orders his B-52s in Russian airspace to drop the Big One.
This inciting incident originally allowed Peter Sellers to play Mandrake, a British commander trying to stop the misadventure and uncover the fail-safe codes that nobody seems to be able to find; the dozy U.S. president, Merkin Muffley, in the War Room trying calmly to explain to Russia’s president, Dimitri Kissov, that his ass will shortly be grass and America is the lawn mower; and Dr. Strangelove, a wheelchair-bound ex-Nazi scientific adviser in a silver-gray wig and big glasses looking like a cross between Andy Warhol and Stephen Hawking and sounding like Peter Lorre. The result of this schizoid hubbub is, well, let’s put it this way: the Peter Bryant novel that inspired Kubrick’s film was originally titled Two Hours to Doom.
Here, Steve Coogan, a monarch of British merriment on TV and film for the last two decades, goes one better than Sellers’s inimitable, protean hat trick; he assumes a fourth role, Major Kong, the Stetson-wearing, hee-hawing Texas good old boy who rides the nuclear payload to oblivion.
“It’s like flying when you become someone else,” Coogan once told me for a New Yorker profile. “It’s a very calm place to be. It’s like curling up in a warm blanket.” Coogan has a good line in confusion and ineptitude, but it doesn’t project as well across the footlights as it does on-screen. Still, he has some delicious moments: wrestling with Strangelove’s robotic artificial arm in a losing battle to control its Nazi salute, and, as President Muffley, getting into a tangle worthy of Abbott and Costello with one of his generals about the strategy of “pre-taliation”: “If the Russians attack us … we pre-taliate, before they even think of taliating against us.”
The general thinks the president should be kept in the dark about such plans; the president insists he’ll be the judge of what he needs to know. “But, sir, how will you know what you don’t know?” the general asks. “I don’t know,” the president says, adding: “I do know what I do know and not what I don’t know, but you know what you know and what I don’t know. So you tell me what you know and what I don’t know and I’ll add to it what I know and that way I’ll know what I don’t know … Is that clear?”
According to Iannucci in a recent interview with The New York Times, the dialogue in Kubrick’s shooting script amounted to 45 minutes; the West End show is a little over two hours. Inevitably, the play is word-heavy. Without the camera’s flexibility—the close-up, the interior shots, the variety of angles—the stage event has less oxygen and texture. It feels earthbound and loses much of its comic velocity.
Take, for instance, the sensational neon-lit War Room, with its halo of blinking screens and a behemoth elliptical table, which was Kubrick’s monumental design around which he orchestrated the fine filigree of comic observations. Onstage, the table still dominates but without the same mock-heroic imperial swagger. Instead of feeding the fun and enhancing the drama, it mutes it. The actors are pinned down by the table and can’t talk effectively across it. It jams the traffic plan and forces a lot of the action around the edges of the stage and into the corners of the proscenium.
For instance, in one of the funniest film moments, Mandrake is held at gunpoint by a soldier as he tries to call the president from a pay phone to warn him of imminent nuclear catastrophe. The White House won’t accept a collect call, and he has no change. To get his quarters, Mandrake pulls rank and commands the soldier to shoot the nearby Coke machine. “If you don’t get the president of the United States of America on the phone, you know what’s gonna happen to you? You’re gonna have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company,” the soldier says, then blasts the machine. He kneels to pick up the quarters, and the machine spits Coke in his face. Shunted off to the side of the stage, the sight gag is more or less out of sight and goes for nothing.
The play may be a simulacrum of the movie’s plot, but it can’t replicate its visual or verbal daring. For its money, however, the West End audience does get Hildegard Bechtler’s imposing B-52 fuselage and some fancy back projections that give the illusion of falling bombs and bodies. These novelties aside, in the translation from the picture house to the playhouse, the grotesque is generalized and the comedy minimized. The hardworking actors sing the audience out with nuclear clouds mushrooming behind them, and in front of them Vera Lynn (Penny Ashmore) rises from a trap door to sing “We’ll Meet Again.” It’s defanged fun, a reminder, if more were needed, that our lives are a picnic on an increasingly eroding precipice.
I came away from opening night thinking of all the wars and catastrophes and potential disasters facing the world that evening. The words that kept coming back to me were not Kubrick’s or Iannucci’s but Alexander Pope’s ironic, mock-heroic invocation of Chaos and the apocalypse at his doorstep in the finale of The Dunciad (1728): “Thy hand, great Anarch!! lets the curtain fall; / And universal darkness buries all.”
John Lahr is a Columnist at AIR MAIL and the first critic to win a Tony Award, for co-authoring Elaine Stritch at Liberty
