Theatre review: A Very Expensive Poison

It's seven years since Lucy Prebble has written for the stage, a self-imposed exile because - as the playwright herself admitted when that play got adapted for radio - she was so happy with The Effect that she genuinely didn't believe she'd ever match it. Well, she's finally braved the weight of her own high expectations to debut A Very Expensive Poison at the Old Vic, and instead of taking similar ground to her last play it instead goes back to ripping its story from the headlines like her earlier hit ENRON. It also uses something like that play's genre-hopping, metatheatrical style, although director John Crowley can't quite bring the flair of a Rupert Goold to it. Based on Luke Harding's book of the same name, A Very Expensive Poison follows the murder of Russian whistle-blower Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210, a radioactive substance so rare it could be traced back to the precise nuclear plant where it was produced; and despite this the trouble Litvinenko's widow Marina had getting anyone in power to point the finger at the most obvious suspect.

The play is narrated by MyAnna Buring (as opposed to YourAnna Buring) as Marina, who is simultaneously in the present telling the story to the audience, in 2006 trying to help DI Hyatt (Gavin Spokes) investigate her husband's murder, and with a lawyer (Thomas Arnold) at various points between, trying to convince successive UK Governments to open a formal investigation.

All of these require her to flash back to her life with Alexander (Tom Brooke) in 1990s Russia, where he was an FSB detective whose refusal to help assassinate oligarch Boris Bereszovsky (Peter Polycarpou) led to a change in the leadership of the FSB. Unfortunately under the new director (whom the show never names, I mean you can't be too careful, but they do admit his first name's Vladimir) the links to organised crime only get worse, and Alexander blows the whistle on TV. After some fierce reprisals their only hope is that the new President will prove a new broom to clear out the corruption, only for the director to become the new President. With his nemesis in the highest office, Alexander has no choice but to seek asylum for his family in the UK, but he continues to investigate corruption once there.

Although there's a quirkiness to the storytelling up to this point, it explodes by the end of the first act, around the same time that Tom Scutt's letterbox set does the same. Alexander taking Hyatt on a tour of the places he could have been poisoned has the tension of a whodunnit. Professor Dombey (Amanda Hadingue) gives us a brief history of Polonium in the form of a fairytale shadow-puppet show (inspired by the Russian folklore characters who gave the twin reactors their names.) Taking their cue from the translated episodes of Spitting Image that gave Russia a first taste of satire against their leaders, giant Gorbachev and Yeltsin heads enter the Litvinenko house to spy on them. With Polycarpou playing him, it's not too surprising if Boris does a song, and the bumbling assassins who poisoned Alexander more through luck than judgement (Michael Schaeffer and Lloyd Hutchinson) are a vaudeville comedy act. What's satisfying is the way all the storytelling trickery feels on-theme with the misinformation, smoke and mirrors - at one point a literal song-and-dance number is the distraction that allows the assassins to escape.

All the time the President (Reece Shearsmith) looks on from one of the boxes like Statler and Waldorf, heckling and daring the audience to choose his version of the truth over the one being presented on stage. He's a regular scene-stealer, and a contrast to the heart of the play provided by Brooke and Buring as the genuinely loving central couple. Prebble's technical achievement in putting together A Very Expensive Poison is hard to deny, but it does occasionally wobble in the execution: The running time does feel a little too leisurely, and Crowley doesn't quite convince in tying all the various strands and styles together. And it's a shame that the device of having the actors come out of character near the end feels clumsy and doesn't really come off. It makes it at times a frustrating watch - the kind of show you feel is just that step away from being something very special indeed - but it undoubtedly manages to mix a genuine warmth and respect for the story's tragic victims into the quirky and irreverent way it tells it, and if the whole doesn't quite come off there's elements of the show I'll likely be remebering fondly for some time to come.

A Very Expensive Poison by Lucy Prebble, based on the book by Luke Harding, is booking until the 5th of October at the Old Vic.

Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.