I recently saw the West End stage adaptation of Stanley Kubrick’s 1964 satirical sci-fi film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Comic actor, writer and producer Steve Coogan plays the starring role.

The play reminded me how much I had enjoyed an exhibition about Kubrick’s work at the Design Museum in London a few years ago. You can read about that here.

Dr. Strangelove follows a fictional US President and his Chiefs of Staff as they desperately struggle to halt a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Russia initiated by a rogue General.

It is as relevant today as it was when it was first conceived in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Steve Coogan’s breakthrough role in the 1990s was Alan Partridge, a socially inept and offensive radio presenter. In Dr. Strangelove he plays three different parts, just as Peter Sellers did in the original film.

Except Coogan has to transition between roles in real time, at lightning speed. He manages it brilliantly, with not a hair out of place.