By Lauren Murphy
It started with a phone call. “I thought it was a hoax,” Sean Foley says. “But in my mind’s eye I could immediately see that this could be really fun. It was one of those amazing phone calls that sometimes happen in our business, from the two producers — who basically said, ‘Do you wanna adapt and direct Dr Strangelove for the stage?’”
Foley, an experienced theatre director, writer and actor, jumped at the chance to work on the first-ever stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1964 film Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The Cold War satire, which stars Steve Coogan in multiple roles (originally played by Peter Sellers in the film), opened in London’s West End in October and will transfer to Dublin for a run at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in February.
“It’s an amazing story,” Foley says, nodding. “Kubrick himself called it a ‘nightmare comedy’, which is a great phrase, I think. So I was attracted to the material and the challenge of being able to stage something like that. It’s basically a comedy about the end of the world.”
Foley co-adapted the script with Armando Iannucci, a man who is well versed in satirical and political fare, having created, written and directed the TV series The Thick of It and Veep, films In the Loop and The Death of Stalin, as well as co-creating (with Coogan) one of culture’s most enduring comedy characters in Alan Partridge.
“I didn’t want all the blame if it went wrong,” Foley says, laughing. “I’d known Armando for a very long time, but we’d never worked together, so I thought he’d be an absolutely perfect person to work with on the adaptation. I gave him a bell and it took him a nanosecond to say yes. It could be a poisoned chalice if you get it wrong, but I think we both felt we could bring something to it in remaking it for another medium, and in remaking it for a new audience.”
The art of storytelling is in Foley’s blood. He holds dual Irish and British citizenship, thanks to his Waterford-born father, and promptly applied for his Irish passport following the “forlorn decision” of Brexit in 2016. “I was one of the lucky people to have Irish roots,” he says, acknowledging how he had previously worked in Dublin with the Gleesons — Brendan, Domhnall and Brian — on a production of Enda Walsh’s The Walworth Farce in 2015. He has fond childhood memories of spending summers in the seaside town of Tramore.
“In my memory, it was always sunny — but of course, it couldn’t have been,” he says. “[But] there’s no question, in my mind anyway, that the Irish people as a nation are incredible storytellers of every description. There’s something innate that I’ve always connected to, certainly, in that culture. There’s an amazing awareness. It’s there in Beckett; I always think that Beckett is a really funny writer but when you’re in England, they’re so sober-faced about it. And it is tragic too — but the point about it is that it’s also funny. And I think that’s a particular Irish viewpoint, I guess, that both exist at the same time. I’ve always been interested in that.”
It is certainly true of Dr Strangelove, which is the second high-profile “sacred cow” of British cinema that he has been involved in recently — earlier this year, he directed the Irish actor Robert Sheehan in the Birmingham Rep’s adaptation of Withnail and I. The opportunity to work with Coogan, whom he had briefly crossed paths with on his 2016 comedy film Mindhorn, was a big draw. Coogan is superb as the four characters of Captain Mandrake, President Muffley, Major Kong and Dr Strangelove amid a nuclear crisis, and the set, stage transitions and character transitions are managed deftly.
“I think what is brilliant about Steve is that he is adept,” Foley says. “In a way, that’s his stock in trade: being able to create characters that are completely different. But although he’d done his live shows with his own characters, he’d never done a play. And I think the most extraordinary thing — and for the audience, as well — is that palpable sense of ‘My God, he’s doing it in front of us’.”
Iannucci’s involvement with the project meant that Coogan, his regular sparring partner, was on board from its early stages. “Steve has worked with Sean before, but he’d said if I was there in the initial stages, it’d give him a kind of reassurance,” Iannucci says, adding how he had never written for the stage before. “But actually, once it got up and running, I think Steve could see he was in really capable hands with the producers Patrick [Myles], David [Luff] and Sean — and with the cast, who are really amazing. So there was a good company strength.”
Iannucci is less able to pinpoint the success of his decades-long partnership with Coogan. “I mean, we’re very different kinds of people, but we seem to share a sense of humour,” he muses. “We can kind of complete each other’s lines if we’re writing comedy, but we have different personalities — and that somehow seems to wor
And also, we haven’t yolked ourselves together as some kind of double act, because these things only last about five or six years. Especially in the early days of Partridge; we only took Partridge out every five years or so, and there’d be a whole year when we were doing separate things and not seeing each other. Other times, we’d see each other but not actually work together. It’s an open marriage, basically. We’re allowed to run off,” he says, chuckling.
“But it means we’ve never grown sick of each other. We’re always looking forward to catching up and seeing what stories the other has to tell.”
One of the challenges with the stage adaptation was coming up with another 40 minutes of dialogue, he says, while the practicalities of allowing Coogan to transition between characters and change costume added another layer of complexity. “Story-wise, it lends itself to the stage because the film is set in three very fixed locations, so you’ve got your three focus points already, and it’s just expanding the themes more,” he says. “We were allowed to look at previous drafts [of Kubrick’s script], and there was a little note — I’m not sure if it was in Kubrick’s writing, or just someone in the room that he was writing with — in pencil, which said, ‘What if they had to decide on an American city to blow up in return?’ So from that, you think, ‘Well, I want to see what that discussion is like.’ So little things in the culture of the original were actually good ways of prodding us into thinking about how we could expand on it.”
Both Foley and Iannucci point to the film’s enduring relevance across the decades; so much so that updating it for a modern audience was not as onerous a task as it might have once been. Iannucci points to the present political situation in the US, which is “as depicted in the play,” he says, wincing. “We literally have someone [Robert F Kennedy Jr] about to join the Trump administration who wants the end of fluoridation in drinking water. And it’s a testament to Kubrick’s script, [which] was all about conspiracy theories and international politics and ego. It was also about blinding yourself in belief of something that just wasn’t there, and that’s then the root of all the problems. Now [politicians] can go, ‘Well … I don’t think that’s true’ and no one holds you to account any more. So we’re back in that weird world again, where people [in power] can say anything, and think anything, and believe anything.”
Foley nods. “It’s pretty much all there in Kubrick’s original. It’s visionary, you know, and if a film had been made in the 1940s with those themes, it would still be relevant. Unfortunately, there are still men — and they are pretty much usually men — running around trying to prove that they’re better than anyone else by making bad decisions. There’s a kind of weird comedy of one-upmanship in that story, in that, ‘Well, if the Russians have got that, I want the same thing.’ I mean, there’s even a new joke that we put in the show: once the Doomsday Machine is explained to them by the Russian ambassador, who says, ‘Basically, they’ve got this new machine which will destroy the whole world’ — one of the American generals goes, ‘My God, that sounds incredible — we should get one of those!’ And someone says, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘Y’know, for next time.” He laughs, shaking his head. “I mean, there is insanity abroad.”
Dr Strangelove is at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre, Dublin from February 5-22
Source: Dr Strangelove director Sean Foley on Steve Coogan’s extraordinary performance