Putin in London
From the creator of ‘The Crown,’ a play about the rise of a dictator and the fall of his onetime patron.
APPLAUSE FOR VLADIMIR PUTIN is an unlikely thing to find in a Western European capital right now, yet eight times a week he receives an ovation at the conclusion of Patriots, a play by veteran British playwright and screenwriter Peter Morgan (best known for The Crown, The Queen, and Frost/Nixon). Patriots—playing through August 19 in the Noël Coward Theatre in London’s West End—is mainly focused on the life and career of the late Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky, who spent his final years in the United Kingdom and who died, apparently by suicide, in his home near Windsor ten years ago. Putin, whom Berezovsky helped install as president of Russia only to bitterly regret it, is a key character. Superbly played by Will Keen, who has had to field questions about what it’s like to step into the persona of the world’s foremost supervillain night after night, he dominates its second act in particular. Patriots is an eccentric, brilliant tragicomedy that couldn’t be more relevant as Putin’s imperial dreams reach their ghastly culmination in real life.
Except for a few momentary flashbacks, the first act is set in the turbulent years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the presidency of Boris Yeltsin. Berezovsky (Tom Hollander, whose memorable performance is easily a match for Keen’s Putin), who started out his career as a talented mathematician, is now a wealthy and formidable TV tycoon. A mercurial and hyperactive figure, by turns clownish and dramatic, he is an over-the-top egomaniac—but one who, it seems, genuinely wants to “save” a rudderless, crumbling, chaotic Russia. That’s a tall order: Yeltsin, a hulking mute figure until his resignation speech at the end of the first act, is well-meaning but ineffectual, ailing, and easily manipulated; the Communists, down but not out and emboldened by the economic woes of market transition, are scrambling for a comeback via the ballot box; the secret police, the former KGB rebranded as the FSB, may be nurturing even more sinister plans for a return to power.
Enter Putin, a former KGB lieutenant colonel, now a down-on-his-luck former deputy mayor of St. Petersburg desperately seeking Berezovsky’s help. (Here, the play takes some liberties: Putin is portrayed driving a taxicab after losing his government post when his patron, St. Petersburg Mayor Anatoly Sobchak, was voted out in 1996. In reality, while Putin has indeed talked about moonlighting as a cabdriver in the 1990s, this almost certainly happened—if it did—prior to his work for Sobchak; his resignation from the St. Petersburg city administration was quickly followed by a move to Moscow for a cushy government job.) Impressed by “Volodya’s” humility and seeming decency—even the fact that he spent his KGB career vegetating in Dresden speaks in his favor, since “the alphas, the psychos, the real KGB men of action got sent to London and Washington to do the proper work”—Berezovsky agrees to help.
Before long, Putin is being groomed to become prime minister and Yeltsin’s potential successor. Yeltsin’s powerful daughter Tatiana is skeptical, and not only because of the man’s KGB background: “He’s a little. . . little,” she tells Berezovsky, who takes offense. “You’re short, dear. Not little,” she reassures him. “He feels little. Little is dangerous. Little, in my experience, only ever wants to be perceived as big.” Berezovsky shrugs it off. The way he sees it, Putin’s mediocrity is an asset: no color, no personality, “he’ll do exactly what we tell him to do.”
We know what happens next: The little man grows big, while Berezovsky suffers a precipitous downfall, particularly after he angers his former protégé by using his TV network to criticize Putin’s handling of the Kursk submarine disaster. (Regrettably, the most striking detail of the Kursk episode is omitted: a call from Putin accusing Berezovsky’s channel of hiring “whores” to play the dead sailors’ widows.) Berezovsky goes into self-imposed exile in England, but he does not go down without a fight. He tries to stake out a place for himself as the leader of the opposition and use his still-considerable assets to take down, or at least contain, the monster he helped create.
Those frantic labors come to naught, and as the second act unfolds, Berezovsky finds himself an increasingly marginal figure. Pathetically, he gets an invitation from “the Monarchist Party of Russia” to meet for secret talks to discuss joint opposition to Putin. “Let me explain something,” the exasperated ex-oligarch tells his soon-to-be-murdered associate Alexander Litvinenko, illustrating his point with hand gestures. “Here we have ‘fringe.’ Here we have ‘lunatics.’ And here” (pointing even farther out) “we have monarchists.” With Litvinenko dead by polonium poisoning and Berezovsky’s attempt to sue a rival over ownership of an oil company a failure, the exiled oligarch sinks into despondency. A letter to Putin attempting a reconciliation—apparently a real thing—goes unanswered; Putin composes a scathing reply, then tears it to shreds because “he’s not worth it.”
In a haunting final scene, Berezovsky takes his own life, his final words a poignant elegy for Russia: the songs, the mushroom-picking forest hikes, the snow, the ice cream, the camaraderie in the sauna, even “the comfort of being wrapped against the wind in a shapka ushanka” (the classic Russian fur hat with ear-covering flaps).
MOSTLY FACTUAL, Patriots has an entirely fictional storyline portraying a supposed mentor/student relationship between Berezovsky and the legendary Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman. (It’s not only fictional but impossible: While a flashback scene shows Berezovsky being brought to Perelman for tutoring as a boy, he was, in fact, two decades Perelman’s senior.) Their conversations, however, give the play an added philosophical dimension as they discuss pure science versus practical politics and grapple with the very different meanings of such concepts as the infinite and the impossible in the world of abstraction and the real world.
There is much to savor in this play. The dialogue is snappy, as in an early exchange between Putin and Berezovsky: “What is a man without loyalty?”—“Rich, usually.” The fast-moving scenes ably distill much larger events, helped along by dynamic, sparse, yet flashy staging by Rupert Goold. The performances are excellent, with Keen and Hollander complemented by Luke Thallon as oligarch Roman Abramovich (eager Berezovsky fanboy turned subdued Putin loyalist), Josef Davies as the earnest Litvinenko, and Stefanie Martini as Litvinenko’s devoted, tough-minded wife Marina. Some details that in less expert hands could have been too corny or too bizarre work surprisingly well, such as a conversation between Berezovsky and a ghostly Litvinenko—perhaps existing only in Berezovsky’s head, perhaps an actual visitor from beyond—just before Berezovsky’s suicide.
Other details are indeed too corny. Some references wink too obviously at the audience—for instance, Putin’s comment when he first sees his presidential office about the desk being too large (yes, we get it, the football-field-sized tables), or, on a darker note, Litvinenko’s offhand comment that he’s about to “meet someone for tea” (yes, we get it, laced with polonium). A couple of gratuitous references to Berezovsky’s Jewish background—especially a line which bizarrely, counterfactually implies that being a Soviet Jew was a stroke of good luck akin to the privilege of a Communist Party member—give the scenes showing him and his fellow oligarchs as the power behind Yeltsin’s throne an unpleasant “Jewish cabal” overtone.
Still, Patriots is a masterful exploration of power politics in post-Soviet Russia and of Putin’s authoritarian rise. In this sense, Keen is inevitably the center of the play, as we see him evolve from a self-effacing and even obsequious demeanor—Keen is about an inch taller than the real-life Putin, but he plays “little” very well—to a strongman posture of icy vindictiveness, macho bullying, and demand for absolute loyalty. Keen delivers a brilliant moment midway through this transformation in which a still-nervous Putin, in his first big TV appearance as prime minister—the infamous one in which he promised that Russia would have no mercy on Chechen terrorists and “waste them in the outhouse”—genuinely looks like a talking puppet whose strings are being pulled.) Putin’s early pro-Western stance melts away as readily as his humble persona. By the end, his unsent letter to Berezovsky portrays the West as Russia’s eternal enemy, alien and filled with “liars and hypocrites.” He speaks of patriotism, but the play clearly suggests that it’s Berezovsky and Litvinenko, not Putin, who genuinely love Russia. Keen’s Putin, like the real article, comes across as too soulless to love anything.
PATRIOTS WAS WRITTEN BEFORE the invasion of Ukraine. In the flamboyant production, the dramatic newscasts with footage of Moscow bombings and explosions blamed on the Chechens are fake; in Ukraine today, the carnage is real. Ukraine is mentioned in the play only twice: once, when Perelman laments that unlike “Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Ukraine, Georgia [or] Moldova,” Russia could not experience the fall of the Soviet Union as national liberation; and a second time, when Putin seethes to Abramovich that the exiled Berezovsky sent $50 million to Ukraine to support the pro-Western “Orange Revolution” of 2004-05, “against his own country.” But, obviously, the current moment echoes throughout the play. Putin’s obsession with crushing Ukraine can be seen as a horrific extension of his personal revenge against perceived betrayal and defiance. Abramovich—in real life—has switched loyalties again, moving to Israel and trying to avoid Western sanctions by promising to donate proceeds from the sale of the Chelsea soccer team to victims of the war in Ukraine (but lately waffling on the donation). And the questions raised in the characters’ verbal sparring—can Russia have a national identity apart from empire? do Russians really love Putin or merely suffer from Stockholm syndrome?—are more timely than ever.
As for Berezovsky’s ghost, some see its present-day incarnation in another rebel tycoon, Wagner group chief Yevgeny Prigozhin, whom both pro-Kremlin and anti-Kremlin pundits have sometimes compared to Berezovsky as a media-savvy oligarch with political ambitions. The huge difference between the two, political analyst and onetime Berezovsky associate Stanislav Belkovsky noted earlier this week, was that “Berezovsky did not have his own army, something he always dreamed about.”