Despite being set in the Sixties, Armando Iannucci and Sean Foley’s stage adaptation of the renowned Stanley Kubrick film feels remarkably contemporary with its caustic humour and modern anxieties, writes Lauren Morley.
Part of the brilliance of Stanley Kubrick's Cold War comedy classic, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1965), lies in its visual gags. There are the classic, standout images, including Burpelson Air Force Base plastered in signs that loudly proclaim ‘Peace is Our Profession’ as the base is thrown under Condition Red and ordered to fire upon anyone who dares enter; or nuclear missiles marked ‘Nuclear Warhead: Handle with Care’.
But there are more understated winks and nods everywhere you look: nameplates that reveal the mad General’s full name to be Jack D. Ripper, and show advisor General Buck Turgidson to have a folder labelled ‘World Targets in Megadeaths’. Kubrick frequently lets the camera do the storytelling, cutting between cowboy pilot Major TJ ‘King’ Kong's face, the code on the dashboard and the translation in the code book as he pieces together what they’ve been asked to do and what must have happened for that particular code to come in. It’s subtle, and allows for the different layers of the joke to hit at different times.
Indeed, Kubrick’s screenplay is spare, and gives room for each joke to land, and land again. So how on Earth does this get effectively translated to the stage? And what can we take from a film celebrating its 60th anniversary this year?
Enter Armando Iannucci, and director Sean Foley, who co-adapted Kubrick’s screenplay. Iannucci – a BAFTA- and Emmy-winning modern giant of political satire in film and television – has a signature deadpan style that is fast-paced and purposely cacophonous, leaning in to the tiniest details only for their actual implications to smack the audience around the face a moment later. Olivier winner Sean Foley also has a reputation for writing and directing energetic, snappy comedy in theatre, penning The Play What I Wrote (2001), a tribute to comedy duo Morecambe and Wise, and directing comedy classics such as Noël Coward’s Present Laughter (Chichester Festival Theatre, 2018), and send-ups of everything from Shakespeare (The Upstart Crow, 2020) to satirical puppet show Spitting Image (Idiots Assemble: The Spitting Image Musical, 2023).
NT Live: Dr. Strangelove (2025)
The National Theatre’s 2025 production Dr. Strangelove, starring Steve Coogan, is imbued with the signature Iannucci comedy style, translating Kubrick’s visual gags into more pithy one-liners than you can shake a stick at. Mixed in are hilarious riffs on the absurd minutiae of dealing with the fallout of a rogue General ordering a nuclear bombardment of the USSR due to an ‘undetected sneak attack’.
Iannucci was well-prepared to adapt Dr. Strangelove, with political TV comedies VEEP (2012-2019) and The Thick of It (2005-2012) under his belt. When it comes to his films, 2017’s Soviet-set The Death of Stalin immediately comes to mind, but in many ways 2009’s In the Loop is Strangelove’s spiritual successor. Both trace the fallout of a single gaffe, and the rapid and ridiculous descent into war and destruction that follow. Incidentally, though not surprisingly given their longstanding collaboration, Coogan plays pivotal roles in both. In the Loop finds his character sounding the alarm that beleaguered MP Simon Foster’s constituency-office wall is about to collapse into his elderly mother’s garden. Foster fobs him off – an error that catches up to him faster than his initial blunder of publicly declaring that ‘war is unforeseeable’.
NT Live: Dr. Strangelove (2025)
In Foley’s Dr. Strangelove, Coogan plays not only all three roles made famous by Peter Sellers in the film – Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, President Merkin Muffley and Dr. Strangelove himself – but also the role of B-52 pilot Major Kong, a part that Sellers was originally slated to play, but a last-minute knee injury ultimately meant it went to Slim Pickens. What’s more, the titular Dr. Strangelove, an ex-Nazi turned ‘American as apple strudel’ nuclear-weapons specialist, has an even larger role in the stage show than in Kubrick’s original.
The sheer choreography of navigating all of these roles, two of which are characters in the same room, is a clever dance between video feeds, sleight-of-hand stand-in usage, and some shuffling round of scenes and storylines. Coogan pulls it off marvellously, handling more quick changes than any actor would want to deal with in a lifetime – let alone a single show.
NT Live: Dr. Strangelove (2025)
Iannucci’s comedy can feel like the onslaught of news that has made many of us wish, in the past five years, that we lived in ‘precedented times’. And though he and Foley have not modernised the story from its 1960s setting, it decidedly reflects modern anxieties. Drawing on Kubrick’s source material, the play grapples with the perceived threats against ‘traditional’ masculinity, the chokehold of conspiracy theories, and the triumphs of personal bias and gut feeling over evidence. Without giving anything away, these factors even change the motivations behind one of our story threads, putting a new twist on an iconic image from the film.
Foley’s direction also makes this a perfect marriage between film and stage. He brings Kubrick’s work to life before our very eyes, with near perfect replicas of its sets that glide on and off the Noël Coward Theatre’s stage. Foley knows how to bounce Iannucci’s rapid-fire dialogue between characters while still maintaining focus, and uses the space to throw in a few visual gags of his own. For instance, Dr. Strangelove wheels across the entire stage to square up with the Soviet Ambassador, the War Room’s ‘Big Board’ shows a constant trial and error of three-letter codes, and the show is beautifully tied together with some cheeky song-and-dance numbers.
NT Live: Dr. Strangelove (2025)
On the whole, Iannucci and Foley’s take on Dr. Strangelove is a perfect case of the more things change, the more they stay the same. The Cold War may be in the past, but there are echoes of it in our present, and at every turn it is refreshing and cathartic to see the political chaos we feel represented and lampooned so joyfully on stage.
WATCH NT LIVE: DR. STRANGELOVE IN CINEMAS
