Ruth Leon Pocket Review

Patriots – Noel Coward Theatre

What is a patriot? In this riveting play by Peter Morgan, wonderfully directed by Rupert Goold, every man (and they are all men) believes himself to be a patriot, and each believes that his life’s work and patriotic duty is to save the soul of Russia. We know their names – Vladimir Putin, Boris Berezovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Roman Abramsky, Boris Yeltsin – but we’ve never met them before like this, up close and personal, and in Patriots we learn the details of who they are and how they got to be the movers and shakers in a country of which we know only the surface but not the dark underbelly.

It is hard to remember that this is a play, a work of fiction, that the conversations are imagined, the personalities the divinings of Morgan’s fertile mind, the characters the art of the actor, so believable are they. We don’t really know these characters but by the play’s end we think we do and there are enough fascinating and plausible details that we finally understand how Putin could have risen from an unsuccessful local functionary in St Petersburg to a dictator able to justify waging war to satisfy his personal ideology.

It is the ‘90s, Boris Yeltsin is President and a drunk. Boris Berezovsky, the most powerful man in Russia, is a businessman who believes that only the oligarchs, the moneymen, like him, can rescue Russia from its torpid state. His influence is almost unlimited.

He can tell Yeltsin to do anything he wants, including granting him the licence of the country’s communication networks and, as just a small indicator of his power, to give a powerful job, running the state security services, to a nobody, one Vladimir Putin, so that he, Berezovsky, can control it. A young entrepreneur, one Roman Abramsky, is another supplicant, asking Berezovsky for help to widen his own empire in the oil industry which he gives willingly so that he can use it as his own private piggybank.

And then he discovers that, a monster himself, he has created an even bigger monster. In using his influence to get Putin the job of Prime Minister, he comes to realise that his power is being eroded by a man who has no limits, whose appetite for power is even greater than his own, and whose mission is to remove anyone who stands in his way. And Berezovsky does.

Patriots has two towering performances – Tom Hollander as the manic, almost, but not quite, out of control Berezovsky, and Will Keen as the creepy, completely plausible, scarily look-alike Putin. Supporting them are Luke Thallon as the fresh-faced Roman Abramsky who jumps from the Berezovsky ship when it becomes clear who is really in charge, and Josef Davies as the Litvinenko who we discover was Berezovsky’s ever-loyal bodyguard until Putin’s men caught up with him in London and fed him the poison that killed him. It’s a chilling moment, one of many, when he announces casually that he’s meeting some old friends for “a cup of tea.”