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Thursday 14 July 2022

Theatre review: Patriots

I wonder what first attracted noted Arsenal fan Rupert Goold to a play that sticks it to Roman Abramovich? Or perhaps, after The 47th, he wanted to keep to a theme of uncannily accurate portrayals of recent or current world despots - this time Will Keen's disturbingly accurate Vladimir Putin. Both Abramovich and Putin are major characters in the director's latest project at the Almeida, but the central figure in Peter Morgan's Patriots is the man who first brought the two together, arguably the OG Russian oligarch, Boris Berezovsky (Tom Hollander.) A child prodigy with ambitions of winning the Nobel Prize for Mathematics*, in the late 1980s he took an abrupt turn, spotting the pitfalls and possibilities of Perestroika and turning his maths skills to economics. Soon he's one of the richest men in Russia, and with his wealth comes power.

He has huge influence over Boris Yeltsin and his government, as well as the controlling share in the national broadcaster, meaning he dictates the news narrative for the people. He's also got a couple of minor politicians he's helping climb the ladder so his influence remains in the future, like the former deputy mayor of St Petersburg, Vladimir Putin.


Young businessmen like Abramovich (Luke Thallon) also come to him; in return for his financial and political help to become the main source of oil and gas to Western Europe, Berezovsky gets a handshake deal that entitles him to half the profits. Soon the two of them are part of the oligarchy that runs Russia behind the scenes, but when it manoeuvres Putin to the Presidency, their tame politician turns out to be nothing of the sort. He makes it clear to the billionaires that they now work for him, and when Berezovsky refuses he and his head of security Alexander Litvinenko (Jamael Westman, who I guess now specialises in playing Alexanders who died before their time,) become political exiles in England, fearing assassination plots.


Designer Miriam Buether has once again delivered a set that's a star of the show: The central stage is a raised cross, the back wall dominated by large doors that swing open to reveal ominous arrivals. The set and Jack Knowles' lighting are predominantly a dark red, making the stage a kind of inferno while also harking back to a Soviet mindset the country hasn't left behind as much as it likes to pretend. Meanwhile the raised stage is surrounded by bar stools, often occupied by seedy characters drowing their sorrows, giving the impression that the whole place is a dodgy nightclub - it feeds into a running theme in the play that, regardless of who's actually in power at the time, the Kremlin is always run like it's the mafia.


It's a powerfully dramatic staging the play itself doesn't always live up to, particularly in the very dry first act. There's a couple of memorable moments, like Yeltsin's daughter Tatiana (Aoife Hinds) turning up to remind Berezovsky that the mafia metaphor is already very much apt by that President's time. But if the flashbacks to young Boris with his maths mentor (Ronald Guttman) are meant to humanise him, they have the opposite effect - Berezovsky's irratibility with the affable professor means we can always see him as the slippery power-hoarder he'll become.


The second act is much livelier, and does much to explain the problem with the first: Berezovsky has wildly miscalculated the people he thinks he's put in place as puppets, especially of course Putin. Both Keen and Thallon spend much of the first half with their heads hung down meekly, staring at their own shoes and accepting the billionnaire's largesse to rise up the ranks. The play calls Putin the "grey man" who slipped past everyone's attention until he was suddenly in charge of everything, and with a famously expressionless man that means there's little for Keen to play in the first act. This changes in the second, when that impassive face turns into an unstoppable force, meaning the play gets its frightening antagonist, and Keen's every appearance becomes unbearably sinister. Thallon's body language also changes, turning Abramovich into the play's charming but dangerous Judas figure, and it's great to see an actor who's largely cast as lovely young men get his teeth into something different†.


If Keen's is the attention-grabbing performance that's not to take away from Hollander in the central role: He manages to make Berezovsky simultaneously malevolent and sympathetic, which is no mean feat. The supporting performances are also strong, making the most out of a play that's laser-focused on three or four men: The device of using regional British accents to represent the far and wide areas of Russia the characters come from means that Boris Yeltsin (Paul Kynman) turns out to be suspiciously similar to John Prescott; elsewhere, there's a corner of some Russian field that is forever Wolverhampton.


But there's still a feeling that Morgan's cast his net a bit too wide, and the shortcuts he uses to add character depth don't really work: Much like Berezovsky's flashbacks to his tutor, Litvinenko gets some heart-to-hearts with his wife (Yolanda Kettle) to try and make him a bit more three-dimensional, but Westman still ends up feeling underused (a late, in both senses of the word, coda to Litvinenko's story suggests Morgan thinks as much too.) I also could have done with at least some kind of reveal about what dodgy dealings Berezovsky was using his share of Abramovich's profits for. Patriots feels like it gives a strong history of both the growth of the Russian oligarchs, and of how one man's attempt to increase his own power ended up giving it all to Putin, and it's no doubt an interesting story. But it doesn't result in quite the theatrical fireworks I was expecting.

Patriots by Peter Morgan is booking until the 20th of August at the Almeida Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.

*which Phill was keen to point out doesn't exist; but the time it took him to explain what awards Berezovsky probably really meant does explain why Morgan took the shortcut

†if that sounds like a euphemism for "his arse looks great in the tailored suits" that's only because yes, yes it is

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