MOTHER RUSSIA’s WARRING SONS
At the Almeida this shook and delighted us last year: a fresh history play: confrontational , shocking, classic in its focus on vast flawed characters, unnervingly close to documented recent reality. The story of Boris Berezovsky – mathematician, tycoon, kingmaker whose acolytes turn on him – has all the great themes of drama: shifting alliances, tyranny of personality and of power, self-serving arrogance leading to tragedy and defeat, and passionate romantic patriotism. The S-word hovers …but this is a modern history-play and by Peter Morgan: unquestionably his best work.
We begin in the 1990s: Mikhail Gorbachev had reached out towards more Western ways and an open economy, the rigid old Soviet Union collapsed, free market chaos grew in Russia’s Yeltsin decade. It skilfully boils down a complex swathe of history – crazy inflation, the grown of an entrepreneurial robber-baron gangster kleptocracy out of a static state. Patriotism manifests on Berezovsky’s part as a deep sentimental love of land and its songs, firesides and snowy vistas, and on Putin’s a brutal authoritarian statism, a cold purity. It is history seen through people, character, and human clashes.
I wondered , after the close-up intensity of the Almeida, how it would work from a West End gallery: the back is a big replica of the Alameda’s bricks, Miriam Buether’s set the same great red T-shaped table and walkway. But in fact the big shocking events, with overhead bulletins, sound and light and projection, are now even more dramatic: loke the sinking of the Kursk submarine which drove Berezovsky ,on his national TV station, to blame and mock the Putin who had begun to defy him. Likewise his attempted assassination and the real murder of Litvinenko (Josef Davies conveying a striking, military, headlong honesty).
Tom Hollander is again astonishing as Berezovsky, deploying his remarkable capacity to move between an elfin, pixyish playfully ruthless charm and terrifying explosions of rage. Roman Abramovich is Luke Thallon, the “kid” protegé who this alpha-male takes under his wing and who finally defeats him in, rather to our shame, an English courtroom in exile. But Putin – far too lookalike for comfort – gets a fine chilly portrayal from Will Keen, developing from the chippy KGB poison-dwarf via icy bravura towards something finally frightening: a horrid clarity, even in the moments of his most deadly quiet asides. It’s a remendous play, every scene a shock – or a shocked laugh. It still works on this big scale, with the same élan under Rupert Goold’s tight direction. I got the same frisson, nearly a year on, from moments like the one when Putin, once a humble petitioner in an ill-fitting suit, turns on Berezovsky in his new autocratic confidence. “It’s a foolish man who ignores the President” he observes coolly, to which the oligarch explodes “Not if he created that President! Plucked him out of a deputy-mayor cupboard..you are my creature!” Just look at Will Keen’s face at that moment…
All four main protagonists travel through emotional growth or into decadence before our eyes. Hollander’s Berezovsky burns at last with a higher vision, suffering a yearning exile’s heimweh. Putin’s patriotism is a chillier, harder thing , expressed in a haunting scene on a cold fogbound eastern shore where he had sent Abramovich as regional governor. Line after line resonates grimly with today’s Ukrainian ordeal and tragedy.
Box office delfontmackintosh.co.uk. to 19th August
Rating. Still 5.
theatreCat 