'Dr Strangelove' review — Steve Coogan is hysterical in this explosively funny satire about the end of the world

Read our review of Dr Strangelove, adapted from Stanley Kubrick's film by Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley, now in performances at the Noël Coward Theatre to 25 January 2025.

Nuclear annihilation might not seem the obvious choice for comedy, yet Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 movie Dr Strangelove somehow turned Cold War terror into brilliantly silly satire. Happily, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley’s explosively funny new stage adaptation also pulls off that near-impossible high-wire act, with Steve Coogan succeeding Peter Sellers in bouncing between multiple outlandish roles.

Coogan, in fact, outdoes Sellers in playing four parts to his three. That necessitates some lightning-fast quick-changes and the odd creaking plot mechanism to get Coogan offstage. But the knowingness of the latter fits the tone of Foley’s assured production, which easily flips between Airplane!-style genre-busting farce and alarmingly resonant commentary on humanity’s reckless self-destructiveness.

Coogan first appears as RAF Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, whose stiff-upper-lip stoicism gets a bally good pasting when American general Jack Ripper goes rogue and orders planes carrying thermonuclear missiles to attack the Soviet Union. Clueless US President Merkin Muffley (also Coogan) tries to avert global catastrophe, a task made harder by the mysterious Doomsday Machine and a tangle of bureaucratic absurdity.

It does seem depressingly likely that we’ll bring about Armageddon not through grand Bond-villain plans, but via workplace incompetence – a subject that Iannucci has lovingly spoofed before. Other facets feel oddly contemporary: our disastrous overdependence on machines, fears about fakes and misinformation, a shadowy Russian president assassinating his enemies, and an American candidate who refuses to accept the election result.

There’s also the conspiracy theory that begins the whole saga. General Ripper believes that communists are poisoning America’s water supply with fluoride to weaken their “precious bodily fluids” – the kind of mad conjecture you’d now find promoted on X by Elon Musk, or bleated by Donald Trump.

Coogan brings something of his beloved Alan Partridge to the stuffed-shirt Mandrake, who describes Elvis as having an “oscillating coccyx” and speculates that Russia may well be a “hard water area”. However, he could do with amplifying both Mandrake and the bouffant-haired president so that they have impact further back in the theatre.

There’s no such problem with his two more colourful characters. He’s a hoot as the cowboy pilot Major TJ Kong, who in the film memorably rides a bomb like a rodeo bull (Foley finds an entertaining stage equivalent). But the real treat is his white-haired, wildly camp, extravagantly accented former-Nazi scientist Dr Strangelove. Supposedly reformed, he alarms his colleagues with suspect statements while his automated artificial hand jolts into a Nazi salute. It’s absolutely hysterical.

Wonderful too are John Hopkins’ unhinged Ripper, Tony Jayawardena’s sardonic Russian ambassador, Giles Terera’s gum-smacking, warmongering General Turgidson, and Mark Hadfield’s genially hapless advisor Faceman.

Foley adds a witty musical framing (the movie’s use of Vera Lynn is bookended with “Try a Little Tenderness”) and, via Hildegard Bechtler’s canny design, efficiently whisks us between Burpelson airbase, a bomber cockpit, and the Pentagon War Room. And yes, we do get the iconic line “Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here! This is the War Room!”.

You can understand why the material speaks to Iannucci, whose The Thick of It brought us peerless terms like “omnishambles”. Among the best here is the infantile obsession with “the big board”, bickering over the Oxford comma, and the ridiculous but fatal adoption of the word “pre-taliation”, which wrecks the strategy of superpower brinksmanship.

At a time when the world feels terrifyingly precarious once again, this is very much a play for today – both an astute skewering of our worst tendencies and most paranoid fears, and an outrageously funny, much-needed release valve.

Dr Strangelove is at the Noël Coward Theatre to 25 January 2025. Book Dr Strangelove tickets on London Theatre.

Photo credit: Dr Strangelove (Photos by Manuel Harlan)