in Patriots. Photograph: Marc Brenner
Rupert Goold’s vivid production of Patriots has earned its larger space. Time has amplified the impact of Peter Morgan’s play about who runs Russia. At the Almeida last year, this portrait of the power of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his one-time protege Vladimir Putin opened with painful resonance. The invasion of Ukraine was recent; the UK had its own Boris – and was beginning to think about the effects of “charismatic” leadership. With destruction entrenched, the play has a still longer reach; it is a particularly good time to chart how anyone comes to power.
Miriam Buether’s design – black and scarlet, stretching out wide with different levels – is like a Soviet coffer, and something infernal. It suggests huge distances but also restriction. Dynamically projecting the sucking vacuum left by the fall of communism, Morgan pithily suggests that Russia has been in the charge of men so used to controlling an empire that they had difficulty in thinking of themselves as belonging simply to a country.
Here they are, the patriots. Tom Hollander’s Berezovsky is a genie just let out of a bottle: squirming, stretching, roaring, carrying on multiple conversations. All appetite: for maths (he was a boy prodigy, specialising in the infinite, and the basis of decision-taking). For money. For women. For his mother country. Will Keen is Putin through and through, exactly physically and mentally right – with his clenched face, clipped delivery and penguin arms. You see him deciding his best pose in front of the mirror; the cleverness – of writer and actor – is to indicate that he sees the pose as principled. As Roman Abramovich, the marvellously subtle Luke Thallon grows imperceptibly from awkward into implacable. Adam Cork’s folk song-inflected score beautifully conjures other less martial aspects of Russian patriotism, as do gentle memories of mushroom-picking. All this as a reminder that patriotism never was enough.
It is hard not to think of Billie Whitelaw and Samuel Beckett when watching Kate O‘Flynn powering through All of It. Not only because of the one-woman word waterfalls; not only because at one point O’Flynn’s head is lit so that it seems disembodied, as Whitelaw’s was in Not I. O’Flynn has, as Whitelaw had, an unusual forthrightness with slippery material, with sentences that freewheel. She doesn’t savage her speeches, but neither does she get lost in them. She puts over Alistair McDowall’s three monologues, in which women are often on the brink, with a steady robustness: a lesser actor would be tremulous. O’Flynn describes the melting of boundaries between herself and the outside world like a war reporter, delivering what she sees and hears as facts, however improbable.
The title monologue tells of life and death – from babyhood to grannydom – in a breath, mixing the awed and the everyday. The performance is an extraordinary feat but the script relies too much on tumble and velocity to make routine observation exceptional. Northleigh, 1940 is a haunted evocation of being trapped in a shelter during an air raid, bringing memories of Covid confinement.
The sparkiest piece is In Stereo, which has echoes of Virginia Woolf’s story The Mark on the Wall: a mysterious stain leads the speaker into a whirling examination of herself as a splitting, merging being, indistinguishable from the fabric of her house. The script is at its sharpest here, spiked with wit as the narrator dodges and meets herself, or keeps “out of my way”; the direction, by Vicky Featherstone and Sam Pritchard, is at its most inventive, with different voices and blurred video faces.
In a handsome accompanying text these monologues are described as poems, and presented as an ingenious maze of typographical patterns; I wished more of this complexity had been verbal, less reliant for its force on an exceptional performance.
Yours Unfaithfully steals on to the stage with its author’s delectable surprise. In the 1930s and 40s, Miles Malleson was a treasured film and theatre actor: he played Polonius in Hamlet; Canon Chasuble in The Importance of Being Earnest; and the polite hangman in Kind Hearts and Coronets. He had several chins and several wives, and gained fame as a student by impersonating an MP who failed to turn up to speak at the Cambridge debating society. He was at one with the eccentricity of Ealing Studios: daffy and subversive; a pacifist; a founder member of the socialist 1917 Club in Soho; a believer in (and practitioner of) open marriage.
Written by Malleson in 1933 but only now performed for the first time in Britain, Yours Unfaithfully draws on the actor’s own life and encapsulates his apparent contradictions. Directed by Jonathan Bank, of New York’s Mint Theater Company, which specialises in recovering forgotten dramas, the play is overlaid with apparent decorousness and swoony romance. Who wouldn’t melt to Al Bowlly’s Midnight, The Stars and You, or think the evening might be staid when the cast deals in cricket talk and cheery bluffness: “Sorry for being a pig.” Yet whether stumped or porcine, these characters are actually concerned with agreeing to their partners having love affairs and dealing with the fallout. This is a fine and exacting dissection of jealousy; it never falls into conventional moral judgments.
Keisha Atwell gives the “other woman” a degree of apparent calculation that slightly diminishes the complexity of the setup, but Laura Doddington, emotion skimming her face like clouds, is superb as the wife determined to behave unconventionally, and dismayed at finding herself suddenly stewing. Practical as well as beguiling, rescuing herself from any possibility of victimhood, she sends her audience into the night uncertain but hopeful: an ideal theatrical combination.
Star ratings (out of five)
Patriots ★★★★
All of It ★★★
Yours Unfaithfully ★★★★
