This is no laughing matter
The Litvinenko murder drama leaves an odd taste in the mouth of
Is the state-sponsored assassination of former FSB officer, defector and Putin critic Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006 a laughing matter? Lucy Prebble’s new play, A Very Expensive Poison, based on the 2016 book of the same name by intrepid journalist Luke Harding, seems hell-bent on having audiences rolling in the aisles and planting an odd taste in their mouths.
I didn’t expect to hear guffaws erupting in response to a subject whose ramifications are so deadly serious. Prebble – who enjoyed success a decade ago with ENRON, about the collapse of the notorious US energy giant – has resurrected the wacky theatricality with which she approached that zeitgeisty story, seizing on the blackly comic aspect of the rigmarole that attended the Russian’s grisly demise. The operatives sent to dispatch him left a radioactive trail across central London and bungled the first attempts to get him to ingest the Polonium-210 that agonisingly killed him. As she paints it here, in cartoonish colours, the hit men, Andrei Lugovoi and Dimitri Kovtun, are borderline bickering buffoons. Their antics, true enough, involved stopping off at an erotic club in Soho, noted for its giant bronze phallus on the dance-floor. Do we need to see that? Prebble and her director John Crowley think so. Ooh-er, missus.
We’re treated to sights no less outlandish elsewhere, including a Harry Potterish mini-lecture on Marie Curie and towering Spitting Image- style puppets of Presidents Brezhnev, Yeltsin and Gorbachev who gather around a TV to watch Litvinenko’s brave (or foolhardy) 1998 press conference denouncing FSB criminality, which secured his dismissal and the enmity of the new FSB boss.
That was one Vladimir Putin – and in a stroke you could describe as brave (or foolhardy) we get to see Vlad the Bad, too. He’s played
by Reece Shearsmith, go-to-guy for devilish creepiness, as a smarmy, uptight showman, pulling rank with his peculiar manner and busting through the fourth wall to address us, and snipe disparagingly from a dress-circle box.
Overall, there’s a lot of stepping outside the flimsily realist action, conducted as a freewheeling “inquiry” back through the past, prompted by questions from a remarkably clueless copper. Meta-theatrical carry-on is the order of the day; bits of the set disappear or are dismantled to represent Putin and co’s scant regard for the sanctity of borders or the boundary between truth and lies. The audience are implicated by being so transparently acknowledged. Alluding to the 2002 Moscow theatre siege, Shearsmith’s “President” observes the public taste for musicals – “or you shallow b------- won’t come out” and, sure enough, this razzmatazzy affair boasts a zany showtune about oligarchs in London delivered, with a few pretend Cossack kicks, by Litvinenko’s billionaire mentor, Boris Berezovsky (Peter Polycarpou).
Prebble has described the piece – a comeback after a long hiatus – as “risky, clumsy”, which is self-deprecating but accurate: the