Armando Iannucci adapting Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove into a West End play

Dr Strangelove
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Armando Iannucci is adapting Stanley Kubrick’s classic film Dr Strangelove into a West End play, it’s been revealed.

“You can’t fight in here, this is the War Room!”. One of the most iconic quotes from Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 masterpiece Dr Strangelove Or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying About The Bomb. Starring Peter Sellers in multiple roles, it told the story of a rogue US general who triggers a nuclear crisis.

Kubrick directed the film from a screenplay he co-wrote with Terry Southern and Peter George.

Satirist Armando Iannucci, who himself co-wrote and directed a film about useless politicians inadvertently triggering a war, the wonderful In The Loop, itself a spin-off from acerbic sitcom The Thick Of It.

Iannucci will adapt the film for the stage with Sean Foley, who will also direct.

Iannucci said of the project that “it’s both thrilling and hugely terrifying to be asked to adapt Kubrick’s great apocalyptic movie for the stage: which is useful, since it’s a thrilling comedy about huge terror. The events it portrays are no less mad today than when Stanley Kubrick made the film sixty years ago. No-one marshals madness on stage better than Sean Foley so it’s been an extremely enjoyable process plotting our mutually assured destruction together. My hope is audiences will respond to Dr Strangelove on stage with bountiful laughter and shrieks.”

The show will open in Autumn 2024.

British Comedy Guide

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