One of late director Stanley Kubrick’s films is to be adapted for the stage for the first time.
For those who don’t know, Iannuuci is the guy behind the movie The Death of Stalin, and the political satire series Veep and The Thick of It.
His stuff is always worth a watch.
Absolutely - he’s been a major influence on British comedy since producing the radio series On The Hour in the early 90s and is a great performer himself.
Avenue 5 - his most recent HBO show - never seemed to find its feet though.
The only man who I trust to adapt this classic to the stage properly.
It’s interesting they’re planning to keep Mandrake, Strangelove, and President Merkin as all the same actor. I wonder if/how that will influence the adaptation.
They should go with Kubrick’s original idea of having the same actor portray Major Kong as well. Sellers hurt his leg toward the start of filming and claimed he couldn’t move around the B-52 interior set easily, but he was also having trouble with the character’s accent and was glad to bow out. He had an easier time with the president’s accent because he just imitated Kubrick himself.
I had no idea Sellers was originally supposed to play Kong too! It would be impressive to pull that off in a movie, let alone on stage.
I was wondering which actor would be able to convincingly take on the roles of British pilot, German scientist and American president on stage each of which have very different comedic styles? A demanding part!
Iannucci is great at casting highly talented people who are relatively unknown but right for the part though
Theatre is an expensive business. Not as expensive as making a big budget movie or TV show of course, but the potential to recoup your investment is limited to the size of the house you’re playing, each of which incurs high running costs. In movies you can recover the capital cost (pre-production, production, prints) of a $100M film across 5000 screens each seating 200 people at a time four screenings a day, with close to zero recurring costs (other than advertising and revenue share with the cinema). In theatre you have to make back your $10M capitalisation from one venue, 1000 people at a time, with you also having to pay actors, backstage crew, front-of-house, and the venue owner for every performance, which are usually limited to eight per week max.
This is why it’s increasingly common for major theatrical productions (mostly musicals, but also larger-scale plays) to be based on existing IP, and to also feature Hollywood stars to draw in the crows. So in terms of plays (as opposed to musicals), we’ve had stage adaptations of recognisable movie properties like Misery (with Bruce Willis) and Network (with Bryan Cranston).
I would guess that whoever they cast in this Doctor Strangelove adaptation will be well known to the general public. Someone who could certainly do the roles justice is Geoffrey Rush, who’s got the name, the stage experience, and the acting chops. He also played Sellers in what I think might be his best performance, in the TV movie The Life and Death of Peter Sellers. (That said, he is getting on in age and his reputation of late has - shall we say - been tarnished.)
Coincidentally, some years ago I saw a play that was partly about Stanley Kubrick making Doctor Strangelove, and partly about John F Kennedy facing down the Cuban Missile Crisis.
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