“The worse the world gets, the better for this piece”: Armando Iannucci on the production of Dr. Strangelove with Steve Coogan | theater

‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!” Actually, it’s a rehearsal room on an autumn afternoon, but let’s not argue. Here Steve Coogan and the rest of the cast perform a new stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s satire “Dr. Strangelove” from 1964. Watching over them are their director Sean Foley and his co-adapter Armando Iannucci, who together resemble a tall, rugged bricklayer and his small, smiling sidekick.

The actors walk around an unpainted wooden set that rotates to reveal the office of General Ripper, played on screen by the imperious Sterling Hayden and here by John Hopkins. As the scene unfolds, Ripper barks at stiff-lipped group captain Lionel Mandrake, played by Coogan, who weakly holds a computer printout in front of his face.

It is Ripper’s nervous breakdown that sets in motion a catastrophic chain of events that begins with the firing of U.S. missiles into the Soviet Union. The rest of this dark comedy follows the efforts to intercept or otherwise thwart these seemingly unstoppable nuclear weapons as Armageddon looms. Columbia Pictures was excited by the sight of Peter Sellers wearing various disguises in Kubrick’s 1962 film adaptation of Lolita and stipulated that the actor take on multiple roles in the film. He played Mandrake, the fawning US President Merkin Muffley and the sinister nuclear fanatic Dr. Strangelove. He was also slated for a fourth role – Major Kong, the B-52 pilot eventually played by Slim Pickens, and memorably seen riding a warhead like it was a bucking bronco – but an ankle injury put paid to that to nothing.

Coogan, who has often been compared to Sellers and narrowly missed out on the role of the Pink Panther star in a 2004 biopic (Geoffrey Rush beat him out), far outdoes his idol, taking on all four roles. Among the photos hanging on the studio wall today is one that shows him in a Stetson, sitting on the rocket as Major Kong. “Steve, playing all these roles, will bring bravura to the story,” says Foley as he and Iannucci sit down in this London basement room not unlike a nuclear bunker.

To make matters worse, several of Coogan’s characters appear together in the same scene. Muffley and Dr. Strangelove, for example, are both in the War Room at the same time. “Yeah,” Foley says, sucking in air through his teeth. “Could you tell us how to do this?”

A small detail. What is crucial is that the sensitivity of the original is retained. As writer Kazuo Ishiguro wrote, the film is “a remarkable mix of things that shouldn’t go together…Kubrick created the darkest vision imaginable of nuclear war and combined it with absolute comedy.”

It didn’t start that way. Kubrick was adapting Peter George’s suspense novel Red Alert when he realized that the extremity of the doomsday scenario required irreverent treatment. The Cuban Missile Crisis had only recently subsided when he hired Terry Southern, author of the graphic novel The Magic Christian (which Sellers had given to Kubrick), to bring out the funny side of the impending apocalypse.

Selling it as a laugh riot posed another challenge. Mo Rothman, the head of Columbia Pictures, told Kubrick: “The publicity department has difficulty promoting a comedy about the destruction of the planet.” Some critics found the film too strange, to love him. Bosley Crowther called it “vicious and sick” in the New York Times. Foley now says, “We can only hope.”

Any shock value has certainly diminished. “I doubt the audience will say, ‘You shouldn’t joke about that!'” says Iannucci. “Hopefully the piece is a reminder of what is at stake. We view people like Trump as entertainment, while the decisions they make in power have global consequences. It’s not just 30-second clips on TikTok.”

Both men have had a lifelong love for Kubrick’s film. Iannucci was born two months before the opening. “So he wasn’t at the premiere,” Foley points out. “I saw it on video for the first time and I really liked it,” says Iannucci, who knows a thing or two about the comedy of risk management, having written and starred in the political sitcoms “Veep” and “The Thick of It.” “The Death of Stalin” directed.

He also co-created The Day Today, the 1990s news parody in which Chris Morris’s Paxman-esque anchor escalates an innocuous article about a peace treaty into a declaration of global war. This episode is pure Dr. Strangelove, as does the scene from “In the Loop,” the cinematic spin-off of “The Thick of It,” in which a US general uses a pink-talking calculator to calculate the feasibility of a possible war.

“The American release of In the Loop had a Dr. Strangelove,” Iannucci recalls. “And the French producers of The Death of Stalin told me they thought it had a Strangelove-esque feel. I’ve always admired things like Brazil or The Great Dictator: this idea of ​​issues so huge that we can only react in absurd ways. Take the scene in “Dr. Strangelove,” in which Mandrake has to call the President to stop World War III, but he runs out of change. It’s a great comedy situation.”

Foley holds Dr. Strangelove for Kubrick’s masterpiece. “I’m always interested in doing something brilliant in a different medium,” he explains. “Although it may be a poisoned chalice because people may say you ruined it.” So far, so good: Foley’s stage versions of The Ladykillers (in 2011) and Withnail and I (with which he began his tenure earlier this year (finished as artistic director of Birmingham Rep) both were warmly received.

“Ideally, people don’t know exactly which parts were new and which were from the film,” says Iannucci. “When the Kubrick family went through the script, there were lines that they had to look at again to see if they were in the film or not. That’s a good sign.”

Some elements were crying out for an overhaul. “The film is a satire of masculinity and power as well as politics and the arms race,” says Foley. “However, there is only one truly female character: a bikini-clad secretary who is having an affair with one of the generals.” Iannucci winces: “Different times,” he says.

“We didn’t think there was a way to stage it today,” Foley continues, “but then it would be a show with only men in it.” A solution arose in the unlikely figure of Vera Lynn, her interpretation from “We’ll Meet Again” gives the film its bitterly ironic punchline and now appears as a character played by Penny Ashmore. “She’s being dropped off in Russia,” jokes Iannucci.

As if anyone needed reminding that the real world is hardly more stable than the one portrayed on stage, the US election will come early in the campaign and is sure to cause additional turmoil. “The worse the world gets, the better it is for the play,” says Foley.

Even without that, there is the specter of Elon Musk, who seems slightly out of the world of Dr. Musk in his propensity to make the planet a more volatile place. Strangelove could have stepped out. “You can have fun at Musk’s expense,” Iannucci says. “But I find it threatening that those responsible for information give priority to rumors and lies that correspond to their point of view.” In the last few months he has been calling out Musk for the benefit of his almost 700,000 followers, he says, banging his fist on the table in mock anger. He denies that he is waging a sustained campaign of anger against the platform’s owner. “I just sit there at night and see him there and think, ‘Ah, screw it.'”

On the day we meet, Taylor Swift has just come out in support of Kamala Harris and signed her consent form: “Childless cat lady.” Musk responded with a tweet: “Fine Taylor… you win… I’ll give you a child… Iannucci shakes his head in dismay. “You just say, ‘What? Are you threatening to impregnate someone? Just because you run this company, do you feel like you can write whatever you want?’”

I ask if he’ll save some cards for Musk on opening night.

“There has to be limited visibility,” he says. “Let’s give this to him.”