Armando Iannucci, the creator of In the Loop and Veep, will adapt Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb for the stage. The play, which will be staged in London’s West End in fall of 2024, will be co-written and directed by Olivier Award winner Sean Foley. The film famously starred Peter Sellers in three main roles: Dr. Strangelove, a former Nazi scientist; a British officer who learns a U.S. general has ordered a nuclear attack on the Soviet Union; and the President of the United States, who has to act fast to stop World War III. According to BBC News, the production is currently looking for someone who can play all three roles (although the nature of a stage show means that if that’s the direction they go in, the actor won’t have time to swap hair and makeup between scenes like Sellers did).
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The filmmaker’s family are on board with the adaptation, having granted Iannucci access to Kubrick’s personal archives, including ideas and pieces of script for scenes not used in the final film. Iannucci suggested that some previously-unused material might make its way into the stage version. Dr. Strangelove‘s most notorious deleted scene is a pie fight, held in the war room and originally intended to be the big finish for the movie. As far as anyone knows, all the footage from the scene has been destroyed, but some still photos remain.
“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.”
“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,” Kubrick’s widow Christiane said in a statement. “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 subject matter of this film is particularly relevant again in our prevailing political climate,” Kubrick’s daughter Katharina added. “People often laugh when they would rather cry, and this is exactly how the film, and now the play, handles the possibility of the ultimate destruction of life on Earth; certainly, an important topic amongst many, to concentrate the mind.”
Kubrick’s film is widely regarded as one of the best comedies of all time, and one of the defining pieces of media of the Cold War between the US and Soviet Union.
