Dr Strangelove - Review

Noel Coward Theatre, London

****

Adapted from Stanley Kubrick's film by Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley

Directed by Sean Foley

Steve Coogan

It is 60 years since Kubrick’s movie Dr Strangelove stunned audiences. Playing to a world still grappling with the aftershocks of the Cuban missile crisis, his satirical take on the superpowers’ governments and their armed forces tapped into existential fears of mutually assured nuclear destruction. Today, Armando Ianucci and Sean Foley offer up an adaptation of Dr Strangelove in an entertaining tribute to Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant original.

On screen it was the comedic genius of Peter Sellars that played three of Kubrick’s key roles:  a stiff upper lipped British RAF officer (itself a character offering a precursory hint towards Rowan Atkinson’s Blackadder of later years); the American President; and finally the eponymous Strangelove, a crazed nuclear scientist. The story’s satire was inspired, with Kubrick’s movie now recognised as one of the great anti-war narratives of the last century.

In a bold casting move, Ianucci and Foley give Steve Coogan the Peter Sellars responsibilities - adding to his roles by also making him Major Kong, the maverick pilot of the nuclear-armed B-52 bomber. Coogan is a class act, not least when playing Strangelove afflicted by alien hand syndrome. But his evening on stage is a tough gig and he perhaps needs a little longer to become fully fluent in his performance. The supporting company are a blast, with notably great work from Giles Terera as US General Turgidson and John Hopkins as the deranged General Ripper.

It was always going to be a challenge - transferring the opening salvos of a B-52-delivered Armageddon from the broad canvas of film, to the comparative intimacy of a West End stage - and hence it is little surprise that the production team rely on projections (aka film) to convey some of the story’s more graphic moments. The videos are strong but they have a few distracting glitches that need attention.

Wrapping the whole show up, Penny Ashmore rises from the Noel Coward’s bowels to assume the part of Vera Lynne and lead the company in We’ll Meet Again as the world explodes around them. It’s a neat theatrical moment that almost leads into an audience singalong, but it doesn’t match the powerful brutality that Kubrick achieved in his juxtaposition of that song, set to a backdrop of global conflagration.

Dr Strangelove may cut corners in its interpretation of Kubrick’s masterpiece but it still makes for a hilarious night at the theatre as well as a sad reflection upon our world today.

Booking until 25th January 2025 - then on tour to Dublin

Photo credit: Manuel Harlan

Idiots Assemble - Spitting Image - The Musical - Review

Phoenix Theatre, London

**

Written by Al Murray, Matt Forde and Sean Foley

Directed by Sean Foley

Vladimir Putin in Spitting Image - The Musical

Back in the 1980s Spitting Image was a ground-breaking TV series that brilliantly satirised the politicians and celebrities of the day with ingeniously caricatured latex puppets and scripts that mocked all. It was the time of Margaret Thatcher, in turn followed by John Major and it was also a time when to offend was a sacrosanct part of British comedy, political correctness having barely been invented.

Each episode of that show lasted for 30 minutes, short enough to keep writers on their toes with scripts and gags honed to razor-sharp accuracy and all rounded off each week with a punchy musical number that spoofed some hit record of the time with more top-notch irreverence. Peter Fluck and Roger Law were the series' sculpting geniuses whose eyes for ridiculing the great and the not-so-great was peerless. Law lends his name and his vision to this current iteration as Caricaturist Supremo and superficially at least, his inspired vision lingers on.

But a 30-minute blast of Spitting Image on the telly was to prove the medium’s perfect time slot. In a full blown West End musical, two hours proves to be too long to sustain what should otherwise be a series of brilliant jokes.

To be fair, the show’s first act has moments of platinum-plated comedy. The Royals (as was the case back in the day) get treated mercilessly by the writers, who even include an affectionately portrayed ghost of the late Queen Elizabeth II. The recently crowned King Charles III is royally ridiculed as are his sons, wife and brother Andrew and rightly so. Politicians from across the global political spectrum are on the production’s hit list, with a musical number from the Russian President, Putin On The Blitz (geddit?) being perhaps the evening’s lyrical triumph. The first half’s penultimate song has a latex Carrie Johnson leading a chorus of dancing six-foot phalli in All Men Think With Their Dicks, before a line-up of the Tory leadership sing Cabaret's chilling Tomorrow Belongs To Me while the aforementioned penises, complete with winking meatuses, ejaculate skeins of long white paper streamers before the half-time curtain falls. The smuttiest knob-gag in town, but very funny.

The second half however descends into a drawn-out charade of the already thinly-stretched plot-lines worsened by a political bias that transcends all satire and morphs into a tiresome, shallow rant. The musical's incongruous nods to the TV show's all grey John Major and all-powerful Thatcher characters were appreciated by the mostly greying audience, and the ghost-Queen’s closing number of Enjoy Yourself, It’s Later Than You Think was a neat touch, as was her being accompanied by Brian May. But they were too little, too late.

Script aside - the show is a work of impressive theatrical wizardry with the programme listing a massive technical crew. On stage in each performance, twelve puppeteers make the latex live, perfectly synching their movements to the pre-recorded dialogue and music and as should be the way with all good puppet-based shows, those dozen or so humans “disappear” from our conscious vision and we only see the characters they are animating. Equally Alexander Bermange has done a fine job with the show’s recorded backing music.

The bus pass brigade will likely enjoy this mostly anodyne fayre, but Spitting Image died a natural TV death a long time ago. It should have been allowed to rest in peace.

Runs until 26th August

The Dresser - Review

Duke of York's Theatre, London


***


Written by Ronald Harwood
Directed by Sean Foley

Reece Shearsmith and Ken Stott

There's a timeless nostalgia to Ronald Harwood's The Dresser that captures a particular snapshot of England during the Second World War. With the country's fit young men called up to fight, it's left to the "cripples, old men and Nancy boys" to tread the boards. Having served as actor/manager Sir Donald Wolfit's dresser during the 1950s, Harwood's experience provides a bedrock of credibility to the period piece.

Revolving around Sir (played by Ken Stott) and his dresser Norman (Reece Shearsmith), the text plays out during a performance of King Lear. Whilst not a pre-requisite, a working knowledge of Lear helps - for what emerges on stage is not just the parable of Lear and his all-licensed Fool being projected onto Sir and Norman, but we also watch the ageing actor crawl toward death. 

Stott and Shearsmith perform well, with Stott capturing the tragic decline of Sir's body and mind, as Shearsmith, knowingly and in a flurry of campiness after sixteen years of service, devotedly tends to the old man needs. Foley however fails to take his leading actors truly into their characters' skins. There's a lack of chemistry between the pair that's manifest in a lack of empathy from the audience. The second half (which bore witness to a number of post-interval empty seats) drags in a way that Harwood would never have wished, and though Shearsmith is racked with grief at the play’s denouement it's hard, in this production, to share his pain.

There's fine work from the supporting cast whose collection of modest roles set the era of time, place and also emotions, perfectly. Harriet Thorpe's Her Ladyship is a well turned battleaxe of a wife to Sir, while Selina Cadell exquisitely captures an ageing spinster’s pain whose love for the actor had never been returned.

Runs until 14th January 2017, then transfers to Chichester

Photo credit: Hugo Glendinning

A Mad World My Masters

Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon

****

Written by Thomas Middleton

Edited by Sean Foley and Phil Porter

Directed by Sean Foley



Ian Redford



With bawdy banter, cross dressing, a spot of flagellation and smutty double-entendres aplenty, Sean Foley has taken Thomas Middleton’s 1605 comedy and vaulted it forward to London’s Soho in the 1950s with a leap in time that for the most part works lasciviously well. Soho has a natural affinity to amorality, with the programme notes wryly documenting the area’s association with gangland villainy as well as its celebrated strip joints, so for a play that bursts with sexual frustrations, the geography works well.

Some aspects of the plot are timeless. Lust, womanising and the inclusion of that well worn glorious seam of bawdy British humour, the infinite comic potential of the penis, (truly a gift to writers that keeps on giving) are all deployed in an incongruous tale of sexual deception and bungling theft. Oh, and there are also the frequent, pre-Chaucerian gags at the expense of elderly gentlemen whose sexual desires outweigh their abilities, confirming the adage that there is “no fool like an old fool” whenever possible.

The 1950’s are acknowledged via costume and music and in a nod to the skiffle of the recent One Man, Two Guvnors, a beautifully balanced 6 piece band create a mise-en-scene with Shake, Rattle and Roll, going on to pepper the script with other 1950’s gems including the smoothest of takes on Cry Me A River. The musicians are complemented by the powerful Soul presence of Linda John-Pierre, a glorious diva whose voice alone suggests a mellow jazz trombone and slowly rotating 1950’s glitterball with every note she sings.

Heavily stylised maybe, but this confection of a piece contains some cracking performances. Ian Redford’s RSC debut as the blustering Sir Bounteous Peersucker creates a delightful hybrid that suggests the fondly remembered legends of Richard Grifffiths and Robert Morley. Richard Durden as his doddering butler Spunky similarly turns in a marvellously complementary performance as yet another ageing gent, desperately seeking female charms.

Among the boys, Richard Goulding’s Dick Follywit bears more than a passing resemblance to a young David Cameron in his Bullingdon Club days, whilst John Hopkins’ ridiculously named Penitent Brothel is comically priapic in his adulterous seduction of Ellie Beaven’s Mrs Littledick. Hopkins’ singing of the hymnal Yield Not To Temptation, solitary in his bedsit whilst whipping himself, before steamily fantasising about Littledick is a slick combination of acting, comedy and song.




John Hopkins and Ellie Beaven

 

Beaven’s performance is a wonderfully controlled contrast that ranges from an initially frustrated and modestly dressed wife through to a Fosse inspired fantasy seductress in sizzling lingerie that evokes the Daily Telegraph’s Charles Spencer’s famous “pure theatrical Viagra” description from years back, as her character mercilessly messes with Brothel’s mind. Sarah Ridgway’s protagonist prostitute, Truly Kidman, is another chic performance from an actress who knows how to blend naïve coquettishness with downright hilarity, as her character’s arc journeys from bedroom to the impersonation of a god-fearing Irish nun. Ishia Bennison as Kidman’s mother and pimp is a modest role yet one of outrageous and well portrayed depravity with comic moments that belie her talent in flashes of maturely controlled understatement.

Not for the easily offended, Foley’s editing is generally sharp, well-tailored and very funny, though a reference to FGM  from Kidman’s mother as she tells of repeatedly re-creating her daughters virginity is the one intended joke of the night that lacks both taste and sensitivity.

The 2013 RSC Swan company are a sensational troupe. This fusion of Carry On humour and slickly rehearsed Commedia d’ell Arte would easily grace a London stage, whilst their Titus Andronicus continues to shock and astound. Bring on Candide!

In repertory until 25 October 2013