When Steve Coogan first emerged three decades ago playing different characters he was often compared to Peter Sellers. Someone whose real personality was unknowable but who came alive when he inhabited someone else. Coogan has now taken the audacious step of making that comparison more explicit than ever, taking on not one but three roles Sellers famously played in the Stanley Kubrick 1964 satire Dr Strangelove (plus a fourth that Sellers didn’t play, but was intended for him).
And doing it onstage is even more of a challenge. It involves some miraculous quick changes and body doubles, with Coogan often seemingly onstage and arriving onstage at the same time. It’s just one of the tricks that director Sean Foley pulls off in this version co-adapted with Armando Iannucci.
The dark farce-like plot is pretty simple. Due to various reasons the USA, with the RAF’s assistance, is about to drop nuclear bombs on Russia. And the trouble is that the codes needed to cancel the deadly strike are so secret the only person that knows them isn’t able to reveal them. It might be set during the Cold War but it feels horribly topical. Imagine AI being the only thing that knew the nuclear codes.
Coogan first appears as an RAF officer Lionel Mandrake who is dealing with cigar-chomping US General Ripper (John Hopkins). He’s both stiff upper lip and slightly Stan Laurel-ish with some great comic physicality, such as resting his leg on Ripper’s desk like a shorter John Cleese. It’s only in this character, panicky and occasionally out of his depth that we see hints of Alan Partridge – though no actual Ahas – but it’s all the funnier for it.
One quick change and he’s the American President Merkin Muffley chairing a meeting at the Pentagon full of the country’s top brass and a token, dryly funny, Canadian. For a few convoluted reasons the Russian Ambassador (Tony Jayawardena) ends up in the room, lending the scenes extra tension and even more comedy, both verbal and visual.
And then, of course, Coogan plays Dr Strangelove, the distinctly Germanic wheelchair-using scientist who has to stop an arm from constantly Sieg Heiling. There are plenty of laughs to be had from this character who manages to be both comically cartoonish and chillingly sinister (once you’ve got over the fact that he resembles Paul O’Grady).
And there’s the fourth character, Major Kong, the stetson-wearing pilot of a B52 that has missed the command to return to base. Will he drop the bomb? Will Coogan conclude this role by riding into armageddon as if the bomb is a stallion as Slim Pickens did in the film when Sellers had to pull out of this part due to injury? We couldn’t possibly reveal. But I wonder if Coogan took on this fourth role so that it could be said he did more than Sellers did onscreen.
It’s a brave move to put this movie onstage but everyone pulls it off. At first, when soldiers march on and dance to Try A Little Tenderness I thought this was going to be a Mel Brooks-style musical, but it is anything but that. There are lots of laughs, ingenious set-pieces and the dialogue is punchy. Apocalypse Wow.
But it is really Coogan who makes Dr Strangelove a classic production, mixing hard-hitting satire with knockabout humour. It is a hugely demanding role(s) that maybe he was always destined to play and it would not be a bad legacy if it’s the work he is remembered for. Maybe if this is a hit, which it certainly deserves to be, there may even be talk of a film remake. Now that really would see Coogan taking on Sellers on Sellers’ home turf. But judging by this I think Coogan could pull it off.
Booking until January 25. Information and tickets here.
All pictures by Manuel Harlan. Pictured in cockpit l-r: Oliver Alvin-Wilson, Steve Coogan (Major TJ Kong), Dharmesh Patel.
four stars
