Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Is Coogan’s Dr Strangelove as good as Sellers’s? Of course not

Plus: Netflix needs to come to the rescue of this over-stuffed play about Lincoln's assassination

Steve Coogan as the bland, well-meaning President Muffley, in a scene dominated by Giles Terera’s magnificently aggressive General Turgidson. Photo: Manuel Harlan

Stanley Kubrick’s surreal movie Dr Strangelove is a response to the fear of nuclear annihilation which obsessed every citizen in the western world from the end of the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The play’s co-adaptors, Sean Foley and Armando Iannucci, are old enough to recall that fear – but they’ve omitted any sense of collective anxiety from their adaptation. It’s a just a larky tribute to the movie, like a sketch show. Daft not disturbing.

It turns out Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality

The story starts with an insane American, General Ripper, ordering a squadron of B-52s to nuke Russia before the communists can overwhelm the United States. This prompts his amiable British colleague, Captain Mandrake, to ask him to call off the attack. Steve Coogan plays Mandrake as a bumbling Home Counties swot with the diction and mannerisms of King Charles. His vocabulary is improbably prolix. Listening to a burst of Elvis on the radio, Mandrake says: ‘You can practically hear the chap’s coccyx oscillating.’ That’s too cerebral to be funny. But the opening scene works very well because of the absurd contrast between Coogan’s geeky charm and the suicidal intensity of General Ripper (an excellent John Hopkins). We then cut to the war room.

Coogan reappears as the bland, well-meaning President Muffley which gives him few opportunities to shine. These sections are dominated by Giles Terera’s magnificently aggressive General Turgidson, whose bickering with the Russian ambassador descends into a poorly choreographed fistfight. Muffley breaks it up with the famous line: ‘Gentlemen, you can’t fight in here: this is the war room.’ Then, after a quick change of costume, Dr Strangelove appears. And he’s a disappointment, oddly enough. It turns out that Dr Strangelove is like Father Christmas or Stonehenge – more potent as a mythical abstraction than as a reality. You glimpse him on stage and you keep looking back again and again to see if there’s anything more to discover. And there isn’t.

Coogan seems to have modelled his costume on Karl Lagerfeld’s albino wig and tight oil-black suits. And he speaks with a camp Austrian accent like Brüno, the male model created by Sacha Baron Cohen. There are plenty of laughs to be had from the creepy voice and the robotic arm that keeps accidentally rising into a Hitler salute. But is Coogan as good as Peter Sellers? No. Could he dislodge Sellers’s performance from our minds? Not a chance. So what’s the point of the show? It’s like climbing Everest using the same gear as Edmund Hillary. It may be doable but that doesn’t make it worth doing.

The same goes for Coogan’s turn as the crazed Texan, Major T.J. Kong, who straddles the atom bomb and rides it like a bucking bronco. Coogan can’t compete with Slim Pickens, who appeared in the movie, so he delivers a passable karaoke version. This show has the same atmosphere and ambition as Iannucci’s weightless farce, The Death of Stalin. It places a cabal of powerful men in a tricky position and exposes them as a gang of frightened schoolboys. Iannucci and his team clearly admire masculinity but they feel ashamed that they admire it, so they choose to mock it instead. The gags are brittle, nervy and guilt-ridden. Most of the crowd, however, adored this show – including my teenage son – and it won a standing ovation at the end. Doubtless a hit.

Land of the Free tells the tale of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in the folksy manner of a kids’ story book. John Wilkes Booth came from a clan of actors led by his British father, Junius Brutus Booth, whose relatives include Cherie Blair (née Booth). Acting was in the blood, and the show opens with Junius rushing home after playing Cardinal Richelieu on stage. He bursts into the living room, with his scarlet cape billowing behind him, and finds his sons dressed in togas rehearsing Caesar’s death in Shakespeare’s play. It’s like a Monty Python sketch. But the point is well made.

This is a family that prefers gestures to deeds and commentary to action. So when Booth hatches a plot to kill Lincoln, he is rebelling against his father by interfering in history rather than interpreting it through drama. A few weeks before the assassination, Booth becomes engaged to a rich, well-connected beauty, Lucy Hale, whose father is a US senator. But the script overlooks that fascinating romance and examines the story of Boston Corbett, a hatter by trade, who led the posse of vigilantes that hunted and killed Booth after he’d fled the scene of the crime.

Corbett was afflicted by gender dysphoria, to use today’s jargon, and in 1858 he had castrated himself with a pair of scissors in order to neutralise his bothersome libido. So the individual who fired the bullet that slew Lincoln’s killer was a post-op trans woman. There’s so much material here that a play can’t possibly do it justice. Netflix, help.

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