A TIMELY TALE OF POWER-MAD PUTIN
Patriots
Almeida Theatre, London
Until August 20, 2hrs 40mins
★★★★★
This fascinating new play is bang on the money. It’s crisply written by The Crown’s Peter Morgan. Gone are the flunkies of the House of Windsor. In come the robber barons of Putin’s Russia. It’s the story of Boris Berezovsky, a maths prodigy and oligarch who fixed it for former cab driver Vladimir Putin to rise without trace from the security service to the very top.
Boris then makes the mistake of barging in on the Kremlin, thinking he owns the new president. Putin turns on his old mentor with the chilly creepiness of the dictator he is already turning into.
The evening has two killer performances. I can’t quite choose which I prefer. Tom Hollander in a bald wig as the witty, sarcastic, larger-than-life Berezovsky. Or Will Keen’s combed-over Putin, stiff as a corpse, patiently absorbing his former mentor’s insults as he makes swift, decisive moves to consolidate his power.
Both actors are astonishing. There’s classy work, too, from Luke Thallon as a boyish, pliable Roman Abramovich, who reveals his cupidity as he snaps up zillions of oil dollars in the vacuum created by
Boris Yeltsin’s drunken demise.
Patriots is out of date in that it was written before this year’s Russian invasion of Ukraine – before, that is, Putin became a total pariah.
But it’s intriguing to see him in the ascendant, checkmating Berezovsky (sheltered by
Tony Blair in Britain) who ends up tying his own noose.
Alexander Litvinenko’s story is also incorporated (he’s played by Jamael Westman with Yolanda Kettle as his poor wife). Having blown the whistle on the assassination squads of the FSB (the rebadged version of the KGB), he plays the price for his ‘treachery’ by having his tea dosed with radioactive poison in London.
The play is good on pace – it has the feel of a zappy graphic novel – but its exploration of the abuses of patriotism in modern Russia doesn’t go far.
But then, what is there to really know of the rancid Mr Putin or what caused the void where his soul should be?
Rupert Goold thrillingly stages the action in a sort of drinking lounge that feels suitably tawdry.
It certainly had me on the edge of my seat, and a West End transfer is a must.