Riveting: Baroness Wheatcroft reviews 'Patriots'

Patriots: Tom Hollander plays Boris Berezovsky | Image by Marc Brenner

Baroness Wheatcroft

@PJWheatcroft

When Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Putin have their first encounter in Peter Morgan’s riveting play, the oligarch exudes power while toying with a subservient state official. By the end, the dynamic has been totally reversed. Tom Hollander and Will Keen, in the two leading roles, deliver remarkable character studies which are at the heart of Patriots.

While the Ukraine war post-dates the plot, it inevitably hovers over the play but there are other references which make it feel highly topical, not least Berezovsky’s decision to flee to London because there “they value money above all else”.

Belatedly, the United Kingdom government launched its Economic Crime Plan this year. The Economic Crime and Transparency Bill continues to make its way through Parliament and will provide new powers to tackle money laundering but it should be a source of national embarrassment that London had earned a reputation as “the world’s laundromat”, addicted to “dodgy money”, and so welcoming to the oligarchs that many took up residence here and our courts became their favourite place to settle their disputes.

Those dodgy bank notes shower the stage in director Rupert Goold’s fast-paced first act. Hollander’s puckish Berezovsky delights in the fortune he has amassed and the influence it buys. He reasons that, if the politicians can’t save Russia, then the businessmen must. The oligarchs may have robbed the people but, he implies, they remain patriots.

Tom Hollander and Will Keen in the two leading roles deliver remarkable character studies

He and his cronies help Putin over the Kremlin’s wall and eventually install him as president but their mistake was to believe that he would remain their puppet. “I created you,” shrieks Berezovsky in disbelief as Putin turns on him. With the sparest of movements, Keen manages to convey a dramatic change in the president’s physical presence as well as his character. And newly powerful Putin’s ideas for saving Russia do not tally with those of his former backers. While the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 had opened up opportunities for them, to Putin it was a disaster. His mission to make Russia great again means reclaiming territory and clearing out the malign influence of the oligarchs.

Hollander’s Berezovsky is so enamoured of his own abilities that he is naively slow in perceiving threats. When a youthful Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon) approaches him for business support, he provides it without pondering the possible extent of his ambitions or ever getting anything in writing. The resulting dispute lands, inevitably, in front of a British judge, providing an entertaining scene in which she rules in favour of Abramovich, known to the audience as the now-sanctioned former owner of Chelsea Football Club.

By the time he belatedly realises that Putin is his enemy, Berezovsky’s assets are being seized. Granted asylum in London, Morgan has him so desperately homesick that he writes a begging letter to Putin, saying he would work quietly teaching maths if only he were allowed to return to the motherland. It goes unanswered.

His friend and bodyguard, Alexander Litvinenko (Josef Davies makes the former secret serviceman the most upright and honourable character in the cast) suffers an agonising death from polonium poisoning but, as the play closes, one is left thinking that the broken Berezovsky might even have been a little envious of his fate. 

Baroness Wheatcroft is a Crossbench peer

Patriots
Written by: Peter Morgan
Venue: Noel Coward Theatre, London WC2 – until 19 August 2023

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