A black screen with a simple piece of script, Dr. Strangelove, loomed over the gathering audience at the Noel Coward Theater in London’s West End. The subtitle of the source work—how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb—had been shorn from the script. A curious omission, as almost every other aspect of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece of black comedy had been embellished or tweaked by the modern idiom, but not reduced. It’s a surprise there weren’t more injections of topical humor into this 2024 stage version. One might have thought that a recent election stateside, a revival of Russian enmity over the last decade or so, plus the emergence of oligarchic eccentrics on the stage of social media would have made for a kaleidoscopic bash of re-booted jokes.
Enter cartoon-faced Steve Coogan, a British comic who has long skipped along the fringes of Hollywood stardom, to don four roles in the play, three of which were once inhabited by the late Peter Sellers, and front the ship of this Dr. Strangelove revival. Coogan is the star, the central pivot in the cast, and its comic center. The behind-the-scenes folks, plus the supporting players are less known to me, worthy as they all are of recognition. Someone woke up one day with a good idea, at least. Strange that it hadn’t happened earlier. A story about accidental nuclear war. A cast of paranoid, oafish narcissists bent on destroying the world. A satire about the folly of creating an absurd militaristic system that is destined towards disaster. Yes, this was the stuff of cold war fantasy from the 50s and early 60s. But why had it taken sixty years to give this a stage treatment? Of course, one answer is that Dr. Strangelove is a great film. How could anyone improve upon such greatness. Who would have the balls to tamper with it? After all, Wicked notwithstanding, no one bothers to remake The Wizard of Oz. The difference is that this is not a movie remake. It’s a play with a few amendments that otherwise retains the themes and plot of the original work. Furthermore, it retains for the most part the narrative structure of the film, which is like a play in so far as it features only a few sets, most of which are indoors, which also makes it conducive to a theatrical adaptation.
So, is it an improvement, this latter-day remake, designed for the stage but not the big screen? Is it a worthy, next-gen effort at an idea that perhaps each generation should shake a stick at? Yes, is my cautious answer to this latter question at least, though I am still left wondering why it was made and what it really adds to the original work. I ask this last question because other recent revivals—and I’m integrating Wicked into the comment—do indeed build upon an original story. The story and characters of Wicked take everything you might have wondered about The Wizard of Oz and runs with the imagination. The same is true of Peacock’s remake of The Day of the Jackal, which has taken a two-hour film and inflated it to a series, and not a moment is wasted, I’d say. Is the same true of this Strangelove stage-play? Hardly. And it’s not as if the opportunities weren’t there. In the opening scenes, for example, Coogan’s Mandrake character (the first of Sellers’ three from DS 1964) engages in a Marx Brothers-like piece of wordplay with the story’s putative villain, the psychotic General Ripper, who has not accidentally but rather deliberately ordered a nuclear strike against the Soviet Union because—okay, here’s the short version—he blames communists for contaminating the water supply of the western world which has in turn made him sexually impotent. Mandrake learns this in an unfolding conversation with General nutjob after the latter has cut off all communication to the air force base from which he has ordered the nuclear attack. However, Coogan’s Mandrake, wittier and more sarcastic than Sellers’ everyman original, seems aware of the General’s craziness from the get-go. This gives a story-familiar audience a nudge and a wink about themes that implicate dictatorial ramrods the world over, but in my opinion, it compromises the horror of the plot.
What’s more effective is to suggest the complicity of normal human beings with our broken systems by having the supporting characters act as haplessly and as unknowingly as possible. The point here is that someone had risen to the level of militaristic authority, was positioned if not authorized to launch a nuclear strike, and no one had seemed to notice that he was not all there, so to speak. To be fair, Coogan’s Mandrake is of course helpless in response to the attack that Ripper has launched, and he likewise flounders when another nutjob named Bat Guano shows up to capture the General, only to find that he has committed suicide, which leaves Mandrake and others to desperately figure out how to prevent the nuclear attack thereafter. But prior to this point, Coogan’s character issues quips at the rogue general and attempts to argue with him, which feels unconvincing. Because of Sellers’ more understated performance, which has a forlornness throughout, the dialogue between Mandrake and Ripper is at turns cringe-worthy and poignant. Here, Mandrake is too scared to verbally spar with the general whom he’s only just realized is a psychotic. He knows he can’t reason with him. Only when the air force base is secured by government troops, and the now frightened Ripper becomes fleetingly regretful, does Mandrake transform into an assertive, even compassionate figure—one who attempts to connect with Ripper’s essential brokenness. Only it’s too late.
An alteration of the plot pertains to a character that Peter Sellers was supposed to play in the original film but didn’t because of a back injury during production. Major King Kong is the pilot of one of the B-52s that has been ordered by Ripper to drop a hydrogen bomb on a Russian target. In the film, this plane is attacked by either Russian or American missiles attempting to thwart the nuclear strike, but not shot down. Instead, it continues on its bomb run, its radio devices damaged. The radio damage is significant because this prevents the reception of a mission recall code that is concurrently being figured out by the Mandrake character after Ripper’s death. Anyway, in the play, the Kong character, now played by Coogan, is a MAGA allusion: like the original character, he is a Southern caricature, but he is not just a dutiful soldier. He is a Ripper parallel: a conspiratorialist fanatic who will not accept his co-pilot’s assertion that a recall code has been issued, which should end the mission. As a result, this plane continues its bomb run, drops the load, with Kong riding a missile down rodeo-style, just as he did in the movie, and the play winds to a conclusion rather like the film does, with the wheelchair-bound Strangelove character lecturing at the Pentagon about surviving a nuclear winter in mine-shafts inhabited by alpha males and subservient women.
I felt more neutral about this relatively minor plot change, thinking it gratuitous but not especially damaging to the film’s climax. I suppose I was waiting throughout for a scene that would aim a dig at modern extremists, the culture of misinformation, or AI intrusion. Overall, I was surprised to feel that the more modern version was not as well acted as the original film. I suppose this reflects a prejudice that older films or theatrical productions tend to be cheesier, more melodramatic or heavy-handed in their style. But here, it is the remake, reboot, or whatever this is that disappoints slightly with its more farcical tone, quick pace, and supplemental gags. The extra dialogue fills the gaps that film editing would obscure, no doubt, but there’s little excuse for the feeling of rushed lines, the lack of silence in between words. I am reminded that Strangelove, as a film, was a special breed of artwork: at times farcical, it is nonetheless sober. As a viewer, you’re meant to be stilled in its quiet moments, sit nervously and bite one’s lip. In the opening minutes of the film, as Sellers’ Mandrake realizes what is really happening when he looks down at a radio that is playing civilian broadcasting when it shouldn’t, we’re meant to feel the horror and aloneness of a situation that we’re discovering with him. Maybe the differences in production lie in our less naive observation of this plot and subtext, hence the knowing (or pre-taliating, as the play plays) humor of this Strangelove Today exercise. It’s like a lot of things now, I guess, which is why now is as good as any time for Strangelove to revisit us: we sort of know how we got here, but when the moment of shit happening hits, it’s somehow still a surprise.
Graeme Daniels Psychewriter 