Patriots – Noël Coward Theatre, London

Writer: Peter Morgan

Director: Rupert Goold

Peter Morgan has acquired a name for himself in adapting slices of modern history through the eyes of figures we know – or think we do – in stage pieces including Frost/Nixon and The Audience to screen fare from The Deal to The Crown. With Patriots, transferring to the West End from the Almeida Theatre, Morgan turns his eye to post-Soviet Russia, the rise of the country’s oligarchs and the ascendancy of Vladimir Putin.

Morgan’s, and our, way into this labyrinthine tale of greed, power and the corrupting influence of both is Boris Berezovsky, a former mathematician who left academia behind to become a wealthy businessman in perestroika-era Russia. Many of Morgan’s characters, at least in the play’s early moments, have a Chekhovian cadence to their lines. That rhythm is rejected and blown away by Tom Hollander’s Berezovsky, a fast-talking reformist wide boy; a public school Del Boy.

The first act is fast-paced, if a little scattergun, taking us backwards and forwards through Berezovsky’s timeline and establishing his main relationships: with the professor (Ronald Guttman) who wishes his protégé had stayed a mathematician; with Alexander ‘Sasha’ Litvinenko, who investigates an assassination attempt on Berezovsky and subsequently becomes his trusted lieutenant; and with a young, enthusiastic businessman, Luke Thallon’s Roman Abramovich.

But the biggest impact comes when Hollander meets St Petersburg’s deputy mayor and attempts to bribe him to enhance his business interests in the city. The principled politician – Will Keen’s Vladimir Putin – impresses Berezovsky so much that he recruits Putin to become the political face of the oligarchs’ growing power.

Initially unobtrusive and uncharismatic, Keen’s portrayal changes as Putin gains power. As he wrests more power for himself to Berezovsky’s ire, Keen gains a pugnacious stillness, like a compressed spring that could explode at any moment. It makes for an exhilarating contrast with the boundless energy of Hollander, who careens like a walking pinball over Miriam Buether’s brick-faced set.

Between the two, Thallon feels lost and unassuming as Abramovitch – but this is a conscious decision by both Morgan and director Rupert Goold, as the meek man quietly accumulates power and money from under the noses of his bickering friends.

The second act plays more linearly, as Berezovsky and Litvinenko find political asylum in Britain. The latter’s assassination is dealt with plainly. Nuggets of the information that have become well known – the meeting with two former agents, Sasha’s subsequent meal of sushi from an Itsu restaurant – are dropped in with such clumsiness that makes one yearn for the elegance and wit of Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison, which covered the assassination far better.

Indeed, while Morgan throws light on Putin’s ascendancy and the man who orchestrated it, it lacks the wider statement about the Russia we know today that Prebble’s work elucidated so clearly.

In Patriots, we are shown people who each believe they are being patriotic – Berezovsky through reform and money, Putin through anti-corruption measures and loyalty to the state – but whose own personalities cloud their ideals. But with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine showing a side of Putin merely hinted at in Morgan’s script, it feels like this work, compelling though it is, does not reveal as much as it thinks it does.

Continues until 19 August 2023