It’s only 11 months since Peter Morgan’s hectic, tragicomic battle of political wills between Vladimir Putin and Boris Berezovsky opened at the Almeida, but already the play has gained new weight and prescience. Tom Hollander again gives a barnstorming, almost demonic performance as the oligarch who wanted to “save” Russia through capitalism – at considerable personal profit to himself.
Again, he’s matched by Will Keen’s (Olivier Award-winning) twitchy but slowly hardening Putin, the monster who destroys his creator. I don’t think a line has changed in Rupert Goold’s production, but Patriots feels like a deeper and more densely thoughtful work now.
As with The Crown, The Queen and his trilogy of dramas about Tony Blair, Morgan explores global events and grand themes through morally ambivalent public personalities. Berezovsky is a maths prodigy, giving up his pure academic pursuits in favour of getting rich and getting laid in the asset-selloff boom of Boris Yeltsin’s regime. Yet he genuinely sees himself as a patriot, liberating his atrophied homeland.
But the “little” KGB man he promotes to the Kremlin, with the half-willing help of Luke Thallon’s diffidently boyish Roman Abramovich, sees himself as a patriot, too. Berezovsky is obsessed with the science of decision making and the concept of the infinite. He fails at the former, the latter sours on him and he ends up yearning for even a small piece of home.
In a sense, this is a debate about the soul of a country that embraces 11 time zones, 50 nationalities and 150 million people. Miriam Buether’s crimson, cruciform set does duty as a mountaintop, a Kremlin megadesk, and a casino table where everything’s up for grabs.
Goold’s propulsive production allocates random British regional accents to minor characters, partly to reflect Russia’s diversity of languages and dialects, but also perhaps to remind us there’s no monopoly on corruption and bad decisions. Tony Blair’s government granted Berezovsky asylum, but a British judge dismissed his claim that his assets had been wrongly acquired by Abramovich – partly because he was obnoxious and lied in court, partly because he had insisted in the first place that his “partnership” with Abramovich remained off the books.
Above all, the stage here is a combat arena where actors in this necessarily macho play can spar. Hollander’s Berezovsky is part showman, part sprite, in love with his own audacity, merely galvanised when he survives a car bomb in the early minutes. His razored-in bald patch is less brutal this time.
Keen is all cold-eyed, suppressed violence: his Putin’s penchant for staged “false flag” operations seems newly resonant. The imagined conversations between the two characters, and their bullying of Abramovich, are a joy to watch. The female parts are token mothers, secretaries, wives and girlfriends, but there’s a lovely role for Ronald Guttman as the abstracted, purist maths professor in whom Berezovsky confides from childhood.
The script is consistently witty and smart but inevitably, with so much information and history to pack in, some of the dialogue is on the nose. Alexander Litvinenko (Josef Davies), another patriot, repeatedly explains his backstory as the only honest agent in Russia’s FSB security force. Later, working in security for Berezovsky in Britain, he announces he’s meeting someone “for tea” that the audience already knows will be laced with polonium. But this is a minor quibble in a sharp, taut, political drama that enriches the West End.
Noel Coward Theatre, to August 19; buy tickets here
