A nuclear apocalypse is once more a real possibility, amid an increasingly fraught international picture – something which might have allowed a stage revival of Dr Strangelove to make an important intervention on the politics of the day. But the adaptation seems more interested in giving two of its central figures an opportunity to pretend to be someone else: Steve Coogan to be Peter Sellers; and Armando Iannucci to be his pre-Corbyn-smearing self.
As Randy Newman’s Political Science hovers above the hubbub of the recorded crowd at the end of Dr Strangelove, it seems to almost taunt the performance that has gone before it. The play might have been an adaptation to ‘modernise’ the famous Kubrick satire in 2024, but despite being recorded in 1972, Newman’s song feels more up to date with its depiction of American hegemony.
Political Science takes stock of a US ruling class that has been getting high on its own supply for decades – and having started to believe its own PR about providing the world with freedom and prosperity, is now deeply resentful that the world isn’t thankful for America’s largest export: fascist coups in the interest of US corporations. Bemoaning that “we give them money, but are they grateful? No, they’re spiteful and they’re hateful”, without thought of where that money so benevolently donated is coming from, the narrator instead begins to advocate for the nuclear annihilation of the rest of the world.
Through the increasingly miserable Republican and Democrat administrations to follow, that would be an increasingly prevalent factor. Nobody is ever happy after they win the most powerful office in the world – particularly the revolving door of the last two administrations. The Machiavellian misquotation of it “better to be feared than loved” being abandoned for an endless, miserable handwringing. After all we’ve done for you, why don’t you like us?! With that, the US state has grown ever more wildly vindictive, like an abusive partner, levelling threats of economic or literal violence at anyone who can’t see all the ways they ought to love Uncle Sam.
The new Dr. Strangelove, on the other hand,presents several rather antiquated plot points. A British military professional providing a voice of reason in his efforts to prevent an unhinged US counterpart from launching a war based on lies. A war room filled with incompetent yet essentially good-hearted people, who would really prefer not to escalate extinction-threatening tensions, if they can avoid it. And a US President still in possession of all his cognitive faculties, trying to avert that same world-ending event. Even before the result of the last election, most of these ideas had long faded away (certainly during the war on terror, but very much before that too). But due to its recency, the notion that President Muffley could be any reflection on the Joe Biden administration – something emphasised by one throw away gag about Muffley’s former opponent still disputing the result of the last election – ends up being the most ridiculous, and subsequently is far funnier than any of the material here, old or new.
That is not to say that 1964’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is entirely out-dated, however. Adapted from Peter George’s novel Red Alert by George, Terry Southern and director Stanley Kubrick, the script features a number of worryingly relevant satirical notes. The brain rot of the American ruling class might be seen as a modern phenomenon, but the original Strangelove features a US General who is convinced fluoridisation of the country’s water was not a policy to improve dental health, but a communist plot to undermine the sexual potency of American men.
There is also the obvious pointing towards the fact the leading lights of NATO have a long history of recruiting the ‘best and brightest’ from all kinds of monstrous regimes – whatever they might have done, or want to do – provided they will support the interests of their own military project.
And most terrifyingly, the story is built around the dark absurdity that for all the song and dance of liberal capitalist politics, elected politicians are only allowed an illusion of control over national security. The supposed heads of state are tolerated as far as they will serve as a mascot of decisions already made – but the moment they jeopardise that, they are unlikely to last long. At the same time, for all the heft of conspiracies about some great, organised world order, it is unclear if anyone actually is in charge anymore – amid the sprawl of warring factions in every wing of defence, the paranoia that fuels, and the contradictory protocols to limit one another. In this scenario, the original Strangelove skewers the norm which continues to somehow dominate international relations: that mutually assured destruction is a guarantor of peace. Even in a bid to build some kind of Watchmen-esque doomsday device, the millions of moving parts and conflicting interests mean the only things keeping us from oblivion are occasional acts of unlikely individual courage, and pure, dumb luck. Luck that runs out at the end of this particular story – just as it may well still run out as NATO and Russia once again find themselves on the brink of a “shooting war”.
In this case, then, the original remains as relevant as ever on all its most important fronts – while the areas it has aged most noticeably in are not the ones Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley addressed in their adaptation. It therefore becomes difficult to answer a core question about the Dr Strangelove revival. Who is this for?
Primarily, the answer to that might be Steve Coogan. Frankly, I don’t think that’s a bad answer. I can’t begrudge Coogan – an actor and comedian who has made a name for himself transforming his face and voice to personify a multitude of beloved characters – to step into the shoes of a performer he clearly idolised (years after being denied the chance to play him in a biopic). Presumably Coogan has played these parts a million times before in the mirror, at parties, and in private conversation – just as everyone of a certain generation has recycled his own lines to joyous effect.
While my cosplay as Alan Partridge would never merit a stage production of its own, though, Coogan still manages to make this performance his own. An enjoyable cosplay outing, with some fresh takes on the delivery that it takes true talent to eke out. And while his accent as Major TJ Kong (the bomber who was not actually played by Sellers in the original) is pretty shaky, he brings a real joy to his interpretation of the twitching Nazi scientist Strangelove himself. He also has a genuinely great chemistry with surprise scene-stealer John Hopkins (Midsomer Murders sidekick number two) as General Ripper.
Beyond that, though, I feel the answer may also be tied up in Coogan’s long-time collaborator Iannucci. As he continues to insist on delivering behind the scenes satire centring on people who are incompetent, but extremely witty in a vulgar word-salad kind of a way, The Thick of It, In the Loop and Veep have become increasingly out of step with a reality, in which the least remarkable, most monstrously banal individuals in the world retain power indefinitely.
That is a story that he – and a caste of other ‘liberal’ comedians – spent years helping to write, castigating the unprofessionalism or non-PR friendly edges of any alternative to the status quo that was metastasising into something truly malevolent in plain view. Add to that Iannucci’s dogged attempts to join the media’s tarring and feathering of Jeremy Corbyn – the only mainstream political leader still willing to suggest launching nukes, even in retribution, might not be a great idea – as a murderous antisemite, and his attempts to use Dr Strangelove as a means to point to the apparent absurdities of our current era seem decidedly suspect. This is a world he cashed out all his political credibility to help maintain – why should he get to crack knowing jokes about how silly it all is?
The biggest issue that the stage version of Dr Strangelove faces, then, is that amid all this, its actual targets are unclear. If it hoped to modernise the story, to what end did it hope to modernise it? Clearly it doesn’t want to account for the situation as it is now, or Iannucci and co would have to face up to the horses they backed along the way, and how they have contributed to the resurgence of nuclear tensions in the 21st century. So, is this modernisation in service of simply supplying a safe space for Iannucci to titter tamely at an antiquated view of power and international relations, which would no longer stand up to scrutiny from beyond the diehard fans who went to the theatre (or watched the recorded event, as I did)? This seems the most likely – and Iannucci’s cosplay, of himself pre-2015 – is much less successful, or enjoyable, than Coogan as Sellers.