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.
