Ruth Leon’s Pocket Theatre Review: Dr Strangelove – Noel Coward Theatre

In 1964, Bosley Crowther in The New York Times called Stanley Kubrick’s movie Dr Strangelove, “the most shattering sick joke I’ve ever come across”. The almost slavishly admiring stage production currently at the Noel Coward Theatre lives up, or down, to that description.

It starts with a mad air force officer sending US bombers to destroy Russia and the rest of the play details the hapless American President’s attempts to change his orders with the help and hindrance of a plethora of useless generals and the Russian Ambassador.

Hildegard Bechtler’s set is a marvel, moving swiftly from an ordinary office to the Pentagon’s War Room, to a huge bomber cockpit with matching projections to give a lifelike impression of a real aircraft, and back.

For me, the only reason to see it is Steve Coogan’s clever trick of impersonating four different characters, sometimes when they’re in the same scene, and giving each – the befuddled President of the United States, the mad US pilot of the plane on the way to bomb Russia, the British officer who tries to stop him, and Dr.Strangelove himself – an individual persona and voice.

Whether you will enjoy Dr Strangelove depends entirely on whether you thought the original movie was the funniest and scariest and most brilliant thing you’d ever seen or whether, like me, you found it a very expensive version of MAD magazine. If you loved the movie and remember it with a “they don’t make’ em like that anymore” nostalgia, or you’re a founding member of the Steve Coogan fan club, beat a path immediately to the door of the Noel Coward Theatre.

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