Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove is getting an explosive new adaptation
With Oppenheimer's mushroom cloud looming on the horizon, another classic story of nuclear terror is rearing its head: Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.
Armando Ianucci, creator of Veep and Oscar-nominated screenwriter of The Thick of It, will turn the 1964 film into a stage production in London's West End. "In these sad times, what better way to cheer the nation up than a stage show about the end of the world," Iannucci told BBC 4's Today.
Photo by HA/THA/Shutterstock 'Dr. Strangelove'
The forthcoming play marks the first time the Kubrick estate has approved an adaptation of the legendary director's work. "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," Christiane Kubrick, the late director's wife, told the BBC. "But we could not resist authorizing 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 searing and hilarious Cold War satire, which features Peter Sellers in three different roles, was nominated for a quartet of Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. It follows a U.S. general who orders a preemptive nuclear strike on the Soviet Union and the subsequent attempts by senior leadership to stop an attack that would cause a planet-wide nuclear disaster.
The timing of the announcement is fortuitous as Christopher Nolan's portrait of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb," inches towards its opening. "As a story, weirdly it hasn't gone away," Iannucci told BBC News. "It seems the right time to remind people of the mad logic behind these dangerous games that superpowers play. 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."
Iannucci is writing the adaptation along with award-winning playwright Sean Foley, who was behind The Ladykillers and I Can't Sing! The X Factor Musical. The story is still set in the '60s, but will exude a modern feel. "It's got one foot in the '60s and one foot in the present day," Iannucci said.
The Avenue 5 showrunner has been given access to Kubrick's archive, which includes unused scenes and drafts from Dr. Strangelove, some of which will be used in the adaptation.
The play is scheduled to open in the fall of 2024, though the theater has not yet been announced.
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