Mutually Assured Dysfunction: Strangelove Meets the 2020s
A review of Armando Iannucci’s 2024 stage adaptation of the Kubrick classic.
What is the point of endless remakes? In a world crowded with questionable reboots, Jad Sammour has found a good one! His review of Armando Iannucci’s Dr Strangelove stage adaptation points out how this story is oddly fitting, and very adaptable, to the current state of global politics. Read on to find out more about how Elon Musk truly has a finger in every pie, and how perhaps the Bomb was, this whole time, the friends we made along the way. - The Editors
Jad Sammour
Editors: Peder Schaefer & Mathilde Turner
Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964) is a political satire that tells the story of an American general, Ripper, who puts the world on the verge of catastrophe when he orders a surprise nuclear attack on the Soviet Union. When he takes all kinds of measures to make the attack irrevocable, he puts the American war council in a tough spot. But the Soviets have a secret weapon, the Doomsday Device, which would cover the world in 100 years of nuclear fallout in case of any nuclear attack on Soviet grounds. What ensues is a back and forth of comedic struggles to diffuse a nearly indefusable situation, including in its midst one man’s fight to preserve his precious bodily fluids.
With dry and sharp humour, a three-role performance by the legendary Peter Sellers as the US president, General Ripper’s second in command, and Dr Strangelove himself, quirky sexual undertones, and an absurd screenplay, the film is a wonderful work of fiction that remains hilarious and on point 61 years later, especially in light of the absurd Trump administrations. In 2023, a stage play adaptation from Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci (writer and director of The Death of Stalin) was announced to be in the works. I was skeptical about it. After all, as a cinephile, I know what horrors ‘remakes’ can produce. Iannucci’s involvement, however, made me more optimistic, as I am a huge fan of The Death of Stalin (the film, not the event). I never imagined I’d get the chance to watch the Dr. Strangelove stage play, London being far beyond my travel plans at the time, but, lucky me, Kinepolis screened a live recording!
I am no theatre expert, but Dr. Strangelove did not disappoint. In fact, it exceeded my expectations. It was a very well-executed adaptation of a great film with more laughs and a few jabs at our current political climate, modernising the source material – which was really ahead of its time in retrospect – and just driving (further) home the deep trouble we’re really in.
The play follows the film closely, although it includes additional dialogue and scene expansions to give the story additional context and more jokes, which make a seamless addition. The stage cast were electric on stage, carrying out scenes with dynamism and great comedic timing, though I did feel John Hopkins’ portrayal of General Ripper was slightly lackluster compared to Sterling Hayden’s (the original film actor). While the film has some eccentric characters, especially the increasingly patriotic general Turgidson, in the stage adaptation everyone’s performances were comically exaggerated. Honestly, it made things a lot funnier, with jokes rampacked in every few moments, nearly non-stop.
The original Dr Strangelove may have been a reference to Werner von Braun, the German-American rocket engineer who developed the V-2 rocket for Nazi Germany, then switched sides to participate in the American Space programme. This version however…. Let’s just say the play didn’t shy away from alluding to a similar scientific figure: close to the US president? Check. Even though they really shouldn't be? Check. With interesting quirks? Check (human augmentation anyone?). And a big affinity with Nazi salutes? Double check. Hell, they even made Dr Strangelove work closely with NASA! Although the play came out a year before Trump’s second election victory, Elon Musk already took centre stage.
But unlike Musk’s tired comedic efforts, Dr Strangelove remains serious in its comedy, and not a wild buffoonery. Steve Coogan was hilarious as Strangelove, creating a larger-than-life figure of political satire through a whirlwind of funny gags, physical comedy and clever jokes. Coogan also excels in the other three roles he plays: Kong, the Texan commander in charge of bomb safety (not to be confused with the giant monkey, no giant monkeys here), the US President, and Mandrake, the British RAF officer convinced the Russians are poisoning the water system, whose main motivation in the story is to preserve his ‘precious body fluids’.
Among the modernising elements, the play adds a couple of jabs at Putin of course, with several tongue-in-cheek jokes about political opponents happening to fall from buildings, or their planes crashing. Another joke is about President Merkin Muffley’s opponent losing presidential candidate, yet still insisting he won (Muffley is the current president in the play and film) - the play, written during Joe Biden’s presidency, thus pokes fun at Trump’s similar claims. These quips contribute to the story, making it more relevant as they add another layer of recognizability to bridge the gap between the worlds of fiction and reality. Take Mandrake’s conspiracies about the ‘dangers’ of the fluoridation of water: before 2020, it would’ve been absurd to hear such things from government officials, but now they’ve happened, we can’t help but wonder what other conspiracy theories might come true. The utter absurdity and satirical aspects of the original film, poignant at the time, are becoming increasingly relevant - this play revitalizes this relevance to (admittedly less subtly) highlight the idiosyncrasies observable in the current political landscape.On the other hand, given how absurd the political scene has been in the last few years, do we really need a satire like Dr Strangelove to make us realize the fragility and ‘madness’ of politics? In the past 10 years, absurd things, comical yet tragic, have become a reality, so that a story like Dr Strangelove has gone from fictitious absurdity to a tragically real possibility.
