If anyone is going to stage Stanley Kubrick’s legendary black comedy, it’s hard to imagine a better creative pairing than Armando Iannucci and Steve Coogan. Their most famous collaboration may revolve around the impressively long career of Alan Partridge. But together and apart, they’ve forged a tremendous reputation that makes them a perfect match for Cold War madness. With The Thick of It, Veep and The Death of Stalin under his belt, who better than Iannucci to twist the nuclear satire on the eve of Trump’s presidency Part 2? And competitively honing his impressions on shows like The Trip, it’s about time Steve Coogan, who’s established a line away from comic-character film roles for some time, tried his hand at replicating Peter Seller’s comic multitasking.

The pair links up with director and co-adaptor Sean Foley for a surprisingly faithful production. It fuses musical setpieces (Hamilton alumni Giles Terera has a key role) and a sustained sense of military chaos to keep the period paranoia relevant and the main star on stage. It just about works. 

In the early 1960s, rogue American Brigadier General Ripper exploits Plan R to let loose a fleet of B-52 bombers on Russia, ensuring a mass nuclear conflict. Despite the protestations of his polite and cautious executive officer, Mandrake (Coogan as the RAF exchange officer), the base is locked down as American forces attack to try and detain the indisputably mad Ripper and secure the three-letter recall code that only he knows. 

In the Pentagon’s War Room, President Merkin Muffley (Coogan) and his senior staff debate the merits of launching retaliatory, taliatory and pretaliatory attacks as they learn of an automated threat. Russia’s Doomsday Machine is triggered to make the Earth’s surface uninhabitable for ninety years if any nuclear weapon reaches Russian soil. As Mandrake manages to pass on the recall code, one bomber pilot, T.J. Kong, intends to deliver his payload and ensure mutually assured destruction. The future of humanity could be down to the US President’s disturbing ex-Nazi advisor, Dr. Strangelove (Coogan).

To realise Kubrick’s film, Foley employs a multimedia onslaught to ramp up the ridiculous threat and keep the audience on the side and its lead on stage. 

It doesn’t quite get away with the necessary long scene changes and misdirection that allows Coogan to shuttle between costumes and characters but part of the joy is seeing how Foley accommodates this. Some of them are undeniably brilliant and there’s fun for the audience in working them out ahead of time, especially with a few in-jokes thrown into the script.

It’s almost compulsory that Coogan scores one more than Sellers by taking on an additional role: Kong, the memorable bomb jockey played on film by Slim Pickens. And the majority of his performances are suitably nuanced in the heightened mess of the characters he’s interacting with. His Mandrake is palpably based on King Charles’s mannerisms and quite probably gets the most stage time. His President is similar to Sellers’ film portrayal: softly spoken and quietly ignorant in the hubbub (“You can’t fight in here! This is the War Room”), although this incarnation has hair. 

It is the B-52 cockpit, introduced in the second act, that hangs in the memory, making full use of a massive digital background that displays the entire bomber behind the giant cockpit prop on stage. Coogan’s Kong is a calmly assured presence, making it all the more surprising when he jumps to a full-screen digitally enhanced version. 

It’s not the first time a digital Coogan appears. His Dr. Strangelove enters on screen as a pre-record so he can interact with his Muffley. With a shock of white hair, Coogan’s Strangelove seems smaller and less out of place in this War Room, even if he’s a bit cameoed for the payoff. It’s a shame – whether or not that character was Sellers’ finest work in the film – the unreliable, titular doctor is the character that holds in the imagination.

At the end, the palpably male production gets one over on its film predecessor, as it follows through on the surreal military chorus line that runs throughout (from the opening march of Try a Little Tenderness to the bittersweet close of We’ll Meet Again). 

It’s not surprising that Strangelove endures, but as a decidedly period piece, there’s a massive get-out clause worthy of the play’s bureaucratic absurdity. 

It’s difficult to see how the concept could be updated or why anyone would want to — the characters and their challenges very much of their time. But decades later, the absurdity can’t fill the stage like a film, and it’s hard to forget that film exists and still has something to say. That said, the few modern jokes that make it through to 2024’s stage version most likely elicit the most nervous laughs in the auditorium.