Dr. Strangelove (Noel Coward Theatre, London)
Verdict: Armageddon a ticket
Maybe we should call him Steve Sellers, or perhaps Peter Coogan… Either way, comedian Steve Coogan makes a fine fist of channelling the maniacal ghost of the late Peter Sellers in one of his best-known films: Stanley Kubrick’s satire of nuclear Armageddon, Dr. Strangelove.
This is the black-and-white 1964 movie beloved of film buffs, in which Sellers played multiple roles – starting with a chipper English RAF officer, trying to calm a raving American general who’s launched a fleet of nuclear-loaded B-52s at Russia…
And then there’s the US President, struggling to handle the crisis; and, of course, the insane ‘doctor’ of the title – a Bond-style villain from Hitler’s Germany fitted with malfunctioning artificial limbs, who believes he can manage the disaster with a circular slide rule (anyone under 50 may need to Google that last bit).
It’s a tour de (armed) force for Coogan, who slips between his various roles – and associated wigs, costumes and accents – without seeming to break sweat. Not a hair out of place, either.
Except once, when after playing a loony-toon pilot, trying to extinguish a fire in his B-52 bomber as it weaves through mountains in Russian air space to get under radar (cue stunning projections of the Arctic Circle), he must jump back into the skin of RAF man Lionel.
Armando Iannucci’s modest updating of the 60-year-old script is nothing if not a tautly realised homage to the original.
It’s already pulling in a noticeably middle-aged, blokeish audience, whose blushes over the film’s unconscious historical sexism have been spared – thanks to the removal of the film’s gratuitous bikini-clad beauties.
But the thermonuclear madness remains. As Giles Terera, playing one of the panicking American generals, screeches: ‘You gotta have guns! How else are you going to keep things civilised!?’
Nor has Iannucci had much work to do line-wise, thanks to Kubrick’s unimprovable zingers, including the desperate President’s plea to his bickering staff: ‘You can’t fight here – this is the War Room!’
Luckily, Sean Foley’s finely drilled production is also a work of military efficiency. A small ‘whoops…’ in his special theatrical operation and it, too, could have become an apocalypse.
Like the film, it can feel static – especially with all the generals seated at a huge round table in the Pentagon.
But make no mistake. This is an impressive staging, peppered with sensationally unhinged performances, not all of them from Coogan.
I particularly loved John Hopkins as cigar-puffing General Ripper, the psychopathic author of the confusion at the ‘Burpelson’ air base, who is so deeply and steadfastly out of his mind that he threatens to make Coogan himself corpse on stage.
Dr. Strangelove runs until January 25, 2025.
Reykjavik (Hampstead Theatre, London)
Verdict: Catch of the day
Vera Lynn famously sings We’ll Meet Again as the bombs fall to earth at the end of Strangelove; and her song is amusingly reprised in Richard Bean’s Reykjavik when one of the characters stranded in 1970s Iceland is handed another plate of whale meat: ‘whale meat again…’.
Bean is best known for his National Theatre hit, One Man, Two Guvnors. But, a Yorkshireman by trade, he’s also celebrated for thoroughly researched plays including Under The Whaleback, about the fishing industry in his native Hull.
His new one follows the troubled owner of a fleet of trawlers (Poldark’s John Hollingworth), who’s lost one of his ships at sea and is coming to terms with his first ever ‘widow walk’ – a tradition where the ship owner visits each of the widows on foot in a single day.
Only here, a new vicar suggests Claxton should also go to Reykjavik, to help four survivors.
The upshot is a finely balanced comedy about a tragedy, which manages to be sensitive, subversive and nostalgic for a lost era when men risked their lives by spending three weeks at sea for what Bean calls ‘one half of a fish supper’.
Arguably the play lists under the weight of its own catch as it mixes social history, fishing practices and sea legends with bar- room banter.
And in Reykjavik, Bean abandons ethical questions to have everyone tell a ghost story, in the manner of Conor McPherson’s Irish hit play The Weir.
Emily Burns directs a hearty yet moody production on Anna Reid’s terrific set that transforms from a draughty warehouse office overlooking the port to a typical Scandinavian G Plan bar, where the brassy sailors are forced to spike their alcohol-free beer with paint stripper.
Maybe Burns overdoes the spooky atmospherics, but this is one of Bean’s most engrossing plays, matching weather-beaten characters with a powerful emotional undertow.
Reykjavik runs until November 23.
Summer 1954 (Theatre Royal, Bath)
Verdict: Quaintly obsolete
How anyone survived the glacial good manners and cold hypocrisy of the English middle classes in the post-war period is beyond me. Not everyone did, of course. And it was particularly grim for lonely gay men.
Playwright Terence Rattigan was our No 1 chronicler of that period, and now two of his one-act plays have been launched on today’s middle classes in what’s known in the business as a ‘Waitrose Tour’ (here taking in Malvern, Cambridge, Chichester, Richmond, Cheltenham and Oxford, after Bath).
They star the wonderful, now nonagenarian, Dame Sian Phillips alongside Lolita Chakrabarti (from the BBC’s Vigil) and Nathaniel Parker (the Beeb’s orotund Inspector Lynley).
First up is Table Number Seven, in which Phillips attempts to encourage residents at a stuffy Bournemouth guest house to jettison a fake major (Parker), found to have been ‘importuning male persons on the esplanade’ (code for cottaging).
Then, in The Browning Version, Phillips gets a rest and Parker plays a retiring classics teacher presented with an unexpected gift from a pupil – a translation of a Greek tragedy by the poet Robert Browning. The gift exposes cracks in his rotten marriage of convenience to a wife (Chakrabarti) who satisfies herself with other members of staff.
Phillips is sharp as a hat pin, and is a clever bit of casting by director James Dacre – she somehow humanises a nasty old bigot who we’d otherwise deplore.
Parker is meek and cuddly in both his roles, desperately trying to disguise his sexuality. But in The Browning Version he’s a particularly hapless victim of his bitter wife.
And both plays do give a glimpse of the subterranean emotional lakes alleged to lie beneath the sedimentary rocks of chilly English courtesy, in Rattigan’s day.
But much as I respect claims that Rattigan’s real theme was the essential decency of people, these short pieces now feel faintly comic… and quaintly obsolete. In the age of Love Island and Dating Naked, their social attitudes feel like a historical mystery.
Until Saturday and then touring until February 15.
The New Real (The Other Place, Stratford)
Verdict: Dry as dust
With the US election on a knife-edge, David Edgar’s new play about who — or what — makes and breaks a victory could hardly be more timely.
He paints a horribly plausible picture of a political campaign in which, for the campaigners anyways, there are no problems, just ‘challenges’, with every disagreeable allegation countered by a handy half truth, or ‘alternative fact’ (the new coinage for plain lies).
Edgar’s imagined election is set in an unnamed, ridiculously generic Eastern European country. Having escaped Russian dominance and embraced democracy, both sides are now employing experienced political strategists from the West who can make the Eurovision Song Contest an opportunity for a nation to portray itself as ‘a land on song’.
The play begins with blurry film footage of post-war political leaders: JFK, Nixon, Brezhnev, Reagan, Thatcher, Gorbachev, Cameron and a pregnant Samantha outside Downing Street. Alas, it proceeds with a similar lack of focus.
The writing is pithy and clever. Northern, woke pollster Caro (Jodie McNee) runs focus groups to find out the voting intentions of the glibly-defined categories of electors (the equivalents of soccer moms and Rust Belt Nostalgics).
The plot, such as it is, turns on sometime lovers Larry (wily Lloyd Owen) and Rachel (sassy Martina Laird), who worked together to win an earlier election in the States, each hired by opposing parties, finding themselves using the same language and techniques to target the ‘laptop and latte’ voters.
There are a couple of amusing moments: in one, the bloke supposedly signing the words of one candidate instead signs that he is telling lies. In another, a candidate who has had his posture, presentation and speech tightly calibrated, goes wildly off message.
Otherwise, Edgar’s characters are merely highly articulate mouthpieces, impossible to connect with or care about. Meaty content, bloodless drama.
by Georgina Brown
Reverberation (Bristol Old Vic)
Verdict: Grindr gets kinder
Whether the title of Matthew Lopez’s play refers to the sound of Jonathan having vigorous and very noisy sex with his Grindr pick-up is never explained.
But it’s certainly a provocative, dynamic start to an otherwise strikingly hushed, dramatically becalmed study of urban loneliness and the hopeless quest for happiness.
Morose Jonathan never leaves his Tottenham flat where his only friends are his books and his only visitors strangers from Grindr.
An illustrator, he creates condolence cards for people who can’t find the words to express their sympathy.
The bitter irony is that he can’t find his own way through the devastating grief over the death of his lover.
By contrast, Claire, the cheery new tenant upstairs, is always on the move. An American in London, she flits from country to country, and job to job, traveling hopefully in her tireless pursuit of a ‘real, real boy’.
Ti Green’s effective two-tiered diaphanous dolls house design gives the characters nowhere to hide and the bare walls provide a convenient canvas for the projections of Jonathan’s wretched state of mind during frequent panic attacks.
Very little happens, very slowly and too often repeated in a play twice as long as it needs to be.
What grips – and thrills – in Jack Sain’s overblown production are remarkable performances of three needy people momentarily connecting with each other, then losing their nerve.
Eleanor Tomlinson (best known as Mrs Poldark and making her theatre debut) has a bloom and an obvious baby-bump distractingly at odds with her cocktail-fuelled, casually shagtastic lifestyle, but her brittle effulgence shows real star quality.
As hyperactive super-chatty Wes, longing to love even more than to be loved, Jack Gibson makes an impressive professional debut.
Most exquisite of all is the rich detail and grace of Michael Ahomka-Lindsay’s Jonathan, tortured by memories, almost making up for the absence of drama elsewhere. Almost, but not quite.
by Georgina Brown
