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.

Theatre review: The Audience

Possibly inspired by her own initials, Helen Mirren has carved out a niche for herself playing Queens of England, particularly the current one. Peter Morgan's award-winning film The Queen focused in part on her relationship with Tony Blair, through the weekly audiences the monarch holds with the Prime Minister. This is what Morgan expands on in his new stage play - leaving Blair himself behind, he looks at eight of the other people to have held the post during the Queen's reign, and how she might have got on with them during The Audience. Mirren reprises her role as well-known stamp model Elizabeth Windsor, and a high-profile cast join her as the procession of PMs in what are, of course, encounters completely imagined by Morgan - exactly what is really discussed at Buckingham Palace on Tuesday evenings remains strictly confidential.