Plunging into the poisonous world of espionage
Tom Brooke, who was in the BBC hit TV drama Bodyguard (he was Richard madden’s damaged army buddy) and Game of Thrones (as one of the loathsome Freys), will portray Alexander Litvinenko, the former KGB officer who defected, and was then murdered by Kremlin agents with radioactive polonium.
The assassination set off a new cold war between the UK and Russia that has not thawed.
Brooke will appear in Lucy Prebble’s play A Very Expensive Poison, with myAnna Buring portraying his wife marina.
The ensemble company, directed by John Crowley at the old Vic, will include Lloyd Hutchinson, Peter Polycarpou and Reece Shearsmith, among others.
Prebble told me in an email exchange that she used events outlined in Guardian journalist Luke Harding’s book of the same title. It told how Kremlin heavies — apparently under orders from Russian leader Vladimir Putin — devised a complex scheme to kill Litvinenko using a cup of tea laced with a powerful poison. Prebble did ‘deep and time-consuming’ research of her own, talking to Litvinenko’s widow marina and friends and colleagues of ‘Sasha’ (as Litvinenko was known), as well as people involved in the investigation, but ‘not anyone I can name or who is featured in the play’.
She described the play as a piece inspired by the idea of performance: ‘the performance inherent in espionage, the performance of democracy in a “managed” democracy like Russia’s, the performance in a legal process that tells the story to a judge or jury, and the performance in the theatre itself’.
Prebble noted that the performances take place ‘inside each other . . . like a doll’. A Russian doll.
International security services and private intelligence agencies come under scrutiny. Prebble described private intelligence as a ‘flourishing industry that makes money in the shadows’.
She also wrote the award-winning shows Enron and The Effect (and pens episodes for the hit TV drama Succession), and said initially she wanted to make the play a traditional thriller, but realised that aspect was just one part of a bigger story, that included marina’s quest for an enquiry ‘and even that is within something else’.
one poignant part is how Sasha (and marina) help officers understand how and why he may have been poisoned. ‘He does act, in a way, as a detective solving his own murder, in the limited time he has left,’ Prebble said.
A Very Expensive Poison previews at the old Vic from August 20.