I am making small talk with Steve Coogan in a small reception room at the Noël Coward Theatre in London. We’re talking about Coogan playing Mick McCarthy in the forthcoming film Saipan – “He’s from Barnsley, up the road from me” – when someone starts loudly drilling into a nearby wall.
“This is a really bad choice of room,” Coogan says, staring at the wall. “Can they stop?”
“I don’t think so at this stage,” the friendly press person says.
It’s just before the tech rehearsal for the West End run of Dr Strangelove, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci’s stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s dark satire, which moves to Dublin in the new year. Coogan is playing four distinct parts, so he’s understandably a little distracted.
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He stands up. “Come to my dressingroom.”
He pauses. “That sounds a bit weird.”
But then the drill goes off again, and he starts walking. “Seriously, it’s going to be way better than this.”
And so I follow comedy legend Steve Coogan around a warren of ancient corridors. “Where are we?” he says as we pass plasterwork and thick carpets.
“I’m trying to get away from the noise,” he says to one woman as we pass.
He opens a door. It’s not backstage. It’s the stalls of the theatre. Comedy legend Armando Iannucci is sitting in one of the rows.
“Oh, hi,” comedy legend Armando Iannucci says happily.
“I’m doing an interview,” comedy legend Steve Coogan says distractedly, gesturing at me.
Comedy legend Armando Iannucci turns to me. “We actually hate each other,” he says, but Coogan is already heading towards another door.
“Okay, we go this way,” he says, finally finding a door to the backstage area. More warrens, darker ones. We wander under ladders and over wires. Coogan narrates: “Watch your step here. Watch these little lines. Watch all this debris and come through here.”
Having Steve Coogan take me on an epic if distracted trek through a theatre to his dressingroom is the most fun I’ve had in ages. It is, in fact, vaguely Peter Sellers-esque.
Kubrick’s original Dr Strangelove or: How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Bomb came out in 1964, two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis. It’s a brilliantly funny, dark and disturbing film, featuring amazing performances from Sellers in three of the main parts. It’s about a rogue American general who’s instigating a third World War and the president and his former-Nazi adviser, the eponymous Dr Strangelove, who are trying to strategise their way out of the situation.
[ First-look at Éanna Hardwicke as Roy Keane and Steve Coogan as Mick McCarthyOpens in new window ]
David Luff and Patrick Myles, the stage version’s lead producers, first sought permission for the adaptation from the Kubrick estate about seven years ago. None of Kubrick’s work had been adapted for theatre at that point. “It was a hard sell,” Myles says. What sold the idea, in the end, was Luff and Myles’s successful adaptation of another classic satire, Sidney Lumet’s Network, featuring Bryan Cranston.
If anything, a Dr Strangelove adaptation is even more appropriate now than it was when they set out to acquire the rights. Since then Russia has invaded Ukraine and Russia’s president has made threats against Nato. Israel has been attacking the people of Gaza and is at war with Lebanon, unsettling the whole of the Middle East. And the unpredictable Donald Trump will soon, once again, be president of the United States. “The Doomsday Clock, which is this thing that a group of international scientists use to measure how close we are to a nuclear war, is set at 90 seconds,” Luff says. “It’s closer now than during the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
“One gallows-humour joke between Armando and I is that, the worse the world gets, the better it is for the play,” Foley, the play’s director and cowriter, says. “Incredibly, JFK 2, or whatever he’s called” – he means Robert F Kennedy jnr, Trump’s pick to run the US department of health – “says, literally, exactly what General Ripper says in the show, which is, ‘We’ve got to stop all this fluoridisation business,’ and he sees weird plots in vaccination.”
Was Foley intimidated by the idea of taking on a beloved film such as Dr Strangelove? “Obviously not intimidated enough,” he says. “But, yes, absolutely.” He asked Iannucci to cowrite, he says, so that he wouldn’t get “all the blame”.
“The key thing for me was thinking, well, it could be done on stage. It wasn’t a crazy idea in that sense. And therefore, if it could be done, it seemed to me, it was something that we could relish. Once you’ve freed yourself from the idea that people are going to hate you for ruining a masterpiece, then you have to concentrate on what you feel you can bring to it and how you can make a great evening at a theatre.”
Foley also saw something unique in what theatre could do with the concept. “Sellers plays three characters,” he says. “That’s extraordinary. It’s brilliant to see in the film. But some part of you knows damn well that they’ve gone, ‘Cut!’ and he’s gone off and got makeup and a wig and time has passed. On the stage we can’t do that. You’re literally seeing it live, going on right in front of you: Steve Coogan doing four characters. Immediately the bravura quality is already theatrical.”
Do a group of people jump on Coogan and dress him between scenes? He laughs. “I can’t reveal what’s happening, but something like that.” Later he says, “The costumes are tricked and the shirts are sewn together ... It is like a pit stop: you’re literally ripping stuff off, putting stuff on, and then you’re back on stage, wigged.”
Giles Terera, who plays General Turgidson, the part once played by George C Scott, thinks it’s important to consider how changing the medium changes the material. On any given day a theatrical performance lands differently, he says. “When you do it from one week to the next, the world shifts around it, and there are more resonances that may or may not have been there before. It’s a living, responding thing. Movies have that, but the response only goes one way. Whereas in the theatre, as storytellers, you are receptive to the same thing as the audience.”
I sit up in the balcony of the Noël Coward Theatre and watch actors dressed as airmen gather in the seats below before the rehearsal begins. Crew members in black T-shirts move heavy pieces of set about. Foley sits talking to Iannucci in the stalls. “Let’s have it!” one of the airman says as the show commences across three amazing-looking sets: General Ripper’s office, the war room and the cockpit of a huge B52 bomber flying against a huge video screen.
Comedy has always been seen as lowbrow by intellectuals, wrongly, because the best art straddles those two things. Comedy within a drama sugars the pill of difficult subject matter and requires great skill. It’s hard. I like to do things that are difficult. Catholic self-flagellation
— Steve Coogan
“It’s basically an office comedy,” Foley says later. “In the war room, Ripper’s office or the cockpit of a B52 you’ve got three different kinds of workplace settings. Unlike a lot of films, you don’t have to go to 20 different locations.”
It’s an entertaining and impressive production. Because Coogan plays four distinctly different characters, the moments when one of them appears to leave the stage and another enters are like a graceful special effect. But it’s the tech rehearsal today, so there are occasional bugs. At one point Coogan emerges breathlessly as Captain Mandrake but is not fully in costume. These hiccups get worked out as I watch.
Before the rehearsal, in his dressingroom, I ask Coogan why he chose to play four parts instead of Sellers’s three. “He was supposed to do four, but he pulled out of one of them,” he says. “I thought if I was going to do it, I want to go the extra yard and not just mimic what he did. Sellers did define character comedy for a couple of generations, so you want to pay homage to what he did, but I had to own it in some way creatively.”
If Sellers defined British comedy in the 1960s, Coogan and Iannucci have defined it since the 1990s, when they created the news-satirising programmes On the Hour and The Day Today. It was on those shows that Coogan first developed Alan Partridge, who went on to be the focus of several TV series, a film, a podcast and two books across the following decades.
Coogan also went on to do The Trip, 24 Hour Party People and, crucially, Philomena, Stephen Frears’s film about the Magdalene laundries. “Philomena got me my get-out-of-jail-free card,” he says. “No one ever offered me a role like that. I love the idea of being funny and of moving people. I like comedy as a tool. I like daft comedy. I like traditional comedy. I love Porridge and Steptoe and Son, but they had poignancy. They were about flawed individuals, flawed humanity.
“Comedy has always been seen as lowbrow by intellectuals, wrongly, because the best art straddles those two things. Comedy within a drama sugars the pill of difficult subject matter and requires great skill. It’s hard. I like to do things that are difficult. Catholic self-flagellation.”
Coogan and Iannucci, also a Catholic, haven’t worked together since Iannucci’s film In the Loop, in 2009. Coogan says that working together in the 1990s was his comedy schooling. “I was doing impersonations, and even though I was good at them I always found them a bit like a party trick,” he says. “I was trying to weave my impersonations into subject matter that had some substance.
“Armando saw me do my stand-up in 1990, or something like that, and thought, ‘Oh, he’s good,’ and basically offered me a job on On the Hour ... I wanted to do something a bit unusual, but I was also probably a bit more populist in my tastes. I was more intuitive and less intellectual. And Armando was as much intellectual as he was intuitive. He was the grown-up in the room ... Armando cast the die in terms of being confident, being unusual and being a bit avant-garde and not worried about being strange. I learned a new language from Armando.”
I meet Iannucci up in another strange little anteroom in the theatre. He tells me about how Dr Strangelove, along with The Great Dictator, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy had an impact on him as a young man. “I was, like, ‘Oh, you can do comedy of ideas. It doesn’t have to just be jokes or sketches. It can be about things.’”
Iannucci accessed a wealth of material at the Stanley Kubrick Archive, at the University of the Arts in London. Initially Kubrick was working on Dr Strangelove as a serious drama. Then, Iannucci says, “they realised that the only way to tell this story is through the absurdity”.
Reality is absurd, he says. The film version of Dr Strangelove opens with a sign at a military base that says, “Peace is our profession.” “I always thought it was a joke, but you go to the Kubrick archives and find that was what was on the military base. He’s got a photo of it. ‘Peace is our profession.’”
You can really see the power of humour in autocracies, Iannucci says. “When we were doing The Death of Stalin I saw the Stalin joke books that were circulated [in Soviet Russia]. You could be killed if you told a Stalin joke, but people felt the need [to joke]. ‘If I can make fun of him, he hasn’t got me.’ Autocrats hate jokes about themselves. I think it’s because then they can’t control the response to a joke.”
Foley is also a staunch defender of the idea that silly comedy can coexist with serious ideas. He quotes the poet Patrick Kavanagh: “‘There is only one muse, the comic muse. In tragedy there is always something of a lie. Comedy is the abundance of life.’ I always think that in tragedy they’re leaving something out. No matter how dark things are, there is always something that is absurd. Tragedy excludes that, but comedy doesn’t exclude tragedy. Shakespeare wrote a lot more comedies than tragedies, and even the tragedies have a lot of comedy. He knew what he was doing.”
He has previously been involved in stage adaptations of PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster stories, the Ealing comedy The Ladykillers and Ben Elton’s TV show Upstart Crow. Why does he think turning films and TV programmes and books into plays has become so popular?
“In one sense there’s a financial side to it,” he says. “Why mustn’t you say ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre? The real answer is not to do with ghosts and ghoulies. The real answer is because when the management said, ‘We’re putting on Macbeth,’ you knew they were financially in trouble. Why? Because Macbeth is one of the greatest-selling shows of all time.”
But retelling old stories is not a new phenomenon, he says.
Clowns are the greatest form of satire, because they’re about satirising humans – because we’re idiots
— Sean Foley
“If you go back to Shakespeare, again, he was nicking plots off everybody. He’s ‘inspired by’ or he ‘borrows from’. The fact is that we now have cinema in the mix as well as books and theatre and paintings and short stories. Mary Poppins was a children’s story, and then it was made into a big film, and then it was made into a big stage show. Certain stories are very powerful, and people want to do them [again].”
Foley sees some sort of cathartic purpose in art. Giles Terera, who played Aaron Burr in the initial London run of Hamilton, is more optimistic about theatre’s capacity to change the world. Hamilton’s racially diverse casting directly changed how open casting directors were to black actors, Terera says, so it can have an impact. “People rose up and rioted because of [JM Synge’s] The Playboy of the Western World.”
Terera also starred in Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s version of that play at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin in 2007. “Theatre has the potential to allow people a space to think. That’s dangerous, because people being allowed to think for themselves is when things happen ... The really important thing about theatre is that you have two hours where you have your phone off and you sit with your own feelings ... ‘Think about this subject. Don’t turn away from it.’”
Foley is less confident about art’s capacity to change anything. “People say, ‘Oh my God, isn’t it wonderful that Taylor Swift supported Kamala Harris?’ Is that going to swing the election?” he says. “It didn’t. Art is for something else. In this case, specifically, it’s to make people laugh.”
On the other hand, he believes there’s something quite profound about making people laugh. “Clowns are the greatest form of satire, because they’re about satirising humans – because we’re idiots,” he says. “It’s always useful to be reminded of that. The best philosophical statement in the world is somebody walking on stage and slipping on a banana skin on to their arse.”
Dr Strangelove is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin, from Wednesday, February 5th, to Saturday, February 22nd
