This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

It’s a sign of a durable satire that a lot of us can do an impersonation of a deluded nuclear scientist driving the world towards atomic annihilation in Dr Strangelove. Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 parody of Mutually Assured Destruction unleashing accidental war with the Soviet Union captured the intensity and risk of the Cold War arms race in the wake of the Cuban missile crisis, with Peter Sellers as the demented, retired Nazi nuclear scientist serving (or rather puppeteering) a gormless US President, Merkin Muffley.

It’s a brave soul who, in the 60th anniversary year, treads in Sellers’ footsteps when it comes to playing multiple parts in bizarre accents, but Steve Coogan has the moxie for it. In Armando Iannucci’s new adaptation at the Noël Coward Theatre, he brings a classic to the stage in a geopolitical era which feels relevant to the Cold War, against a backdrop of less secure alliances and more mutable politics in the West.

Coogan’s best-known incarnation is of course as the TV talkshow host, Alan Partridge, greasily trying to forge his career as a Norfolk radio star for the past 30 years. Yet he’s also at home playing moral darkness, as in the recent BBC drama The Reckoning in which he portrayed the monstrous Jimmy Savile with disturbing accuracy.

As the bonkers un-denazified Strangelove, Coogan channels his early stand-up experience, working his socks off in successive character changes as Sean Foley directs the action at the full tilt of farce.

Iannucci’s script allows for a degree of impersonation of Sellers and some flexes: the German accent, twisting hands and black gloves of the Kubrick monster are intact, although Coogan dons a shock of dyed blond hair and trendier outfit, adding an Andy Warhol vibe in the war room.

An eye-flicking collusion with the audience at times suggests a greater share of blame when things head for catastrophe, rather than just a bunch of mad chaps from the military-industrial complex getting over-excited. As Captain Mandrake, out of his depth on the US airbase, Coogan has enormous fun with the moustached “ahem-ing” of a Brit suffering the acute embarrassment of being associated with an atomic meltdown.

Eerie parallels keep surfacing: General Ripper has an obsession with fluoride in water, a forerunner of the conspiracy theories of Robert F. Kennedy, America’s incoming health secretary.

President Muffley believes that everything can be smoothed over: a skit on détente’s core belief that keeping talking will fix things. In Foley’s slapstick direction, we flit between White House and Pentagon (where happily for Kubrick traditionalists, the huge oval light still hangs over the war room).

Events gather pace and switching screens permit Coogan to play four roles (one more than Sellers, as he also embodies the cowboy-pilot Major Kong and his unhealthily erotic fixation on warheads). Hence Coogan’s characters can talk to each other in real time, in the manner of Sarah Snook’s barnstorming success as a plethora of people in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Most of the key moments hit the mark. But there is a trade-off in bringing a movie shot with Kubrick’s assurance to the stage and embracing technological enhancement on top of classic farce.

We get the sheer demented nature of a system and characters unable to control a theoretical threat when it mutates into real life conflict. But the original’s unfolding horror and paranoia (at the time justified) about the deep state’s malfunctions are somewhat lacking.

Iannucci’s script rattles along with his uncanny ear for political language hiding unpleasant truths and mortal fears in ideology and jargon, in the same way that we saw in his series The Thick of It and in his movie The Death of Stalin.

He doesn’t fall into the obvious hysterical trap of suggesting that the near-miss of the Cuban missile crisis is analogous to the threat to extinguish a neighbouring country on the battlefield being deployed by Moscow today. But as North Korean soldiers join Russia’s attacks and a Ukrainian leadership facing waning support in the White House flirts with reviving its own nuclear capacity, a drama based around the shaky paradox of deterrence no longer feels like a dusty throwback.

Devotees of the original will find that it is hard to outdo the peak absurdity of Sellers’ “Hello, Dimitri” scene, in which the anguished president calls up his drunk Moscow counterpart on the bat-phone to announce that the US is about to rain down nuclear bombs on the Motherland: “Now then, Dimitri, you know how we always talked about the possibility of something going wrong with the bomb? Well, one of our commanders went and did a silly thing: he ordered us to attack your country.”

“How I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb” was the subversive subtitle of the film, reminding us that disarmament tends to be a lull and that deterrence relies on sanity on both sides of geopolitical divides. That, we keep discovering, can be a less than reliable notion.