Stanley Kubrick’s great apocalyptic Cold War comedy Dr Strangelove is being brought to the stage by Armando Iannucci, best known for more recent shows Veep and Avenue Five.
And the director of the upcoming show, Sean Foley, is seeking an actor who shares the versatility of Peter Sellers – star of the 1964 film in three different roles, including the German scientist of the title, a British officer who discovers a US general has unilaterally ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union, and the American president trying to prevent all-out annihilation.
Iannucci and Foley are searching an actor of equal versatility for the stage version.
Foley told BBC News: “They’ve got to be a great comic actor, of which we have very many. They’ve got to be of that shape-shifting kind of quality.
“It’s going to be a really tough gig. I’m sure some people, when we approach them, are going to go, ‘No way, I’m not going to be compared with Peter Sellers in those roles.’”
Of his ambition to update the story for a 2023 audience, Iannucci told BBC News:
“It seems the right time to remind people of the mad logic behind these dangerous games that superpowers play.
“In these sad times, what better way to cheer the nation up than a stage show about the end of the world.
“Not just with the war in Ukraine, but also the whole apocalyptic sense of global warming and so on – it feels like a very relevant reassertion of the message that, this is the madness staring at us if we don’t do anything about it.
“And currently, we aren’t doing anything about it. So the outcome is not good.
“But if you can leave the theatre with that message and a smile, then all the better.”
Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb was released two years after the Cuban missile crisis.
Kubrick’s family has given its blessing to the production, and given Iannucci access to the director’s archive. His widow Christiane told BBC News:
“We have always been reluctant to let anyone adapt any of Stanley’s work, and we never have. It was so important to him that it wasn’t changed from how he finished it.
“But we could not resist authorising this project: the time is right; the people doing it are fantastic; and Strangelove should be brought to a new and younger audience. I am sure Stanley would have approved it too.”
The show based on the 1964 film will come to London’s West End autumn 2024.