About two years ago, when Armando Iannucci began adapting “Dr. Strangelove” for the West End, he didn’t think the 1964 movie had many direct parallels to today.
The full title of Stanley Kubrick’s film is “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” and it tells the story of a U.S. Air Force general who goes rogue and orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. In the Pentagon’s war room, an ineffectual president (Peter Sellers) dithers, blusters and flails, as he tries to avert World War III.
In the 1960s, the movie became a much-debated hit — a “nightmare comedy,” as Kubrick called it — at a moment when nuclear annihilation was a common fear. Yet for Iannucci, who created the TV series “Veep,” the movie’s contemporary relevance was, at first, more metaphorical: The failure to stop atomic catastrophe was akin to society’s handling of climate change.
Then, the news took over.
As Iannucci and the director Sean Foley worked on the adaptation, which opens at London’s Noël Coward Theater on Oct. 29 and runs through Jan. 25, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia floated the idea of nuclear conflict with the West over its support of Ukraine. China has boosted its nuclear arsenal. And violence in the Middle East has renewed fears around both Iran accelerating its nuclear program and Israel pre-emptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Suddenly, Iannucci recalled in a recent interview in a grand back room of the Noël Coward Theater, his “Dr. Strangelove” felt like “a kind of literal reminder of a real doomsday.”
The prospect that a madman might launch a nuclear strike is more plausible today than during the Cold War, Iannucci said, looking exhausted, having just flown back from Los Angeles and the premiere of HBO’s “The Franchise.” (He is an executive producer of the show.) “The advantage we had in the ’60s was everybody was terrified of nuclear war, and thought, ‘We must do everything to stop that from happening.’” Now, he said, nuclear war doesn’t feel real. “It feels like stuff happening on our screens or on our tablets,” he added, “but not actually in the world.”
“Dr. Strangelove,” the first licensed stage adaptation of a Kubrick work, is Iannucci’s West End debut, and his reputation as a satirical powerhouse has turned it into one of London’s most anticipated new productions.
Over the past 30 years, Iannucci, 60, has become known in Britain for TV shows and movies that have highlighted the vanity, and frequent idiocy, of those in power. With “In the Loop,” he parodied the United States and Britain’s march to war in Iraq. In “Veep,” starring Julia Louis-Dreyfus, he portrayed the vice president’s office as a home of blunders, anodyne policies and foul-mouthed insults. And with “The Death of Stalin,” he turned the brutality of authoritarianism into the darkest of comedies.
Foley, who is directing “Dr. Strangelove,” said that his collaborator was an unlikely face for such sharp-edged comedy. “When you meet him, it’s like he could be a bank manager,” Foley said. But, he added, no one is better at mocking people in power.
Jesse Armstrong, a longtime collaborator and the creator of “Succession,” said that Iannucci, who once considered becoming a priest, had a “strong moral sense,” which gives “an angry undergirding” to some of his work. “You feel the force of it,” Armstrong said.
Despite that reputation, Iannucci insisted that he wasn’t a satirist. “I can see why people say I am,” he said, “but I don’t personally wake up going, ‘What subject shall I satirize today?’”
“I just like making funny things,” he said. Whether it’s about politics, nuclear war or his fears around time passing, “so be it.”
Iannucci’s childhood had little in it to suggest he would end up in his current perch. He was born in Glasgow, and his mother was a British Italian hairdresser; his father, an Italian immigrant, was a serial businessman who tried his hand at everything, including kitchen construction and running a pizza factory.
Growing up, Iannucci loved radio comedy shows, including “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” but assumed he would have a serious job, maybe in academia.
He studied English literature at Oxford University, and it was there, Iannucci said, that he tried comedy for the first time, performing absurdist skits including impersonations of capital letters and Scottish soccer teams.
As he recalled those moments, Iannucci suddenly got up from a plush sofa, asked for the name of a Scottish soccer team — we settled on Queen of the South — then performed an impression that involved him kneeling down repeatedly, as if mimicking sportsmen posing for a team photo. “My knees are so bad,” he said afterward, breathing heavily.
At Oxford, Iannucci spent three years struggling to write a doctorate on the 17th-century poet John Milton, then decided to see if comedy could be a career after all. He joined the BBC and, quickly, created his first hit, “The Day Today,” in which a bombastic anchor (Chris Morris) and correspondents (including Steve Coogan, the star of “Dr. Strangelove”) reported on fake news items.
Iannucci’s move into more overtly political comedy came about almost by accident. In 2004, the BBC asked him to present a documentary about “Yes Minister,” a 1980s sitcom focused on an inept senior lawmaker. As he rewatched the show, Iannucci realized its depiction of British politics was “totally out of date,” because it showed bureaucrats controlling the levers of powers. Now, he thought, it was foul-mouthed spin doctors who ordered lawmakers about, as the ministers tried to grab the attention of 24-hour news channels, while advisers made up policy on the fly.
Soon, Iannucci was making “The Thick of It,” a show that follows a series of hapless government ministers and their teams at the fictitious Department of Social Affairs.
In Britain, that expletive-laden show was a critical hit, including with lawmakers who began referring to it in speeches. Soon, U.S. networks were trying to adapt the show. An initial pilot, for CBS, never aired (it centered on a member of the House of Representatives). Then Iannucci created “Veep” for HBO, in which Selina Meyer, a fictional vice president, ultimately finds herself in power after the president resigns.
Although the show ended in 2019, fans this year flooded social media with “Veep” memes after Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris to run in his stead.
Despite the show’s apparent foresight, Iannucci said that “Veep” had little relevance today. Most of the episodes involved Meyer’s team panicking because she had said something inappropriate(in a typical episode, Meyer tries to develop a position on abortion that won’t offend anyone). Today, Iannucci said, many lawmakers don’t worry about making bizarre statements. “If you had to do ‘Veep’ now, you’d have to rethink the whole dynamic,” he said.
Next month, “Veep” could be back in the news if there’s an Electoral College tie. (Meyer’s presidential run ends in just such a scenario.)
Today, Iannucci, is much more focused on his current show. Kubrick’s movie contained enough dialogue for only a 45-minute show, Iannucci said, so he and Foley had gone through Kubrick’s scripts and notebooks, and also watched deleted scenes (including a custard-pie fight), to inspire new dialogue.
Much of Kubrick’s work, Iannucci said, didn’t need changing to give it relevance. In the movie, the rogue general orders his underlings to bomb Russia partly because he believes communists are adding fluoride to America’s water supply to “sap and impurify” men’s “precious bodily fluids.”
“That’s not a million miles from ‘Bill Gates is putting something in the vaccines to chip our brains,’” Iannucci said.
Still, Iannucci and Foley tweaked parts to nod toward current affairs. In Kubrick’s movie, the Russian president — heard, but never seen — is a drunk buffoon. In the stage show, he is portrayed as a killer able to reach enemies even inside the Pentagon, something that may resonate with West End audiences, given recent Russian-ordered assassinations in Britain.
Most of Iannucci and Foley’s time has been spent simply trying to make a beloved movie work onstage. Challenges have included ensuring Coogan has enough time to change outfits so he can play four roles (two of which are meant to be onstage at the same time), and working out how to include iconic scenes, like one in which an Air Force pilot, waving a cowboy hat, rides a nuclear bomb as it plummets to its target.
Iannucci was still tinkering in the days leading up to the opening. Just before the interview, he had sat in the theater’s balcony watching a rehearsal, his phone aglow as he typed notes to himself about lines he wanted to cut and words he wanted to change. During the interview, Iannucci read some of those notes aloud. One was about a profane punchline that needed more buildup. Another note read simply: “Something better for ‘Tupperware.’”
None of the ideas were about boosting the satire. All were just about being funny.
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