Theatergoers: You don’t have to travel to London this spring to see what’s new and fresh; if the last two weeks are any indication, what’s new and fresh in London has come to you. First, there was the splendid new “Cabaret” which has arrived largely intact on Broadway with a mostly UK cast.
And now at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, you can catch “Patriots” by Peter Morgan (“The Crown”), a dramedy about the Russian we all love to hate—Vladimir Putin.
VP, played by Will Keen whose coif bears an unsettling resemblance to you-know-who’s, squares off against Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhbarg) in the retelling of their feud which began in 2000. By way of information, BB, an engineer, mathematician and oligarch, made his fortune in Russia in the 1990s, when the country implemented privatization— and he gained control over Channel One, the country's main television channel one. BB also helped fund Unity, the political party that would form Putin’s first parliamentary base.
Once Putin finally does come to power, however, he becomes a dictator, bending the country to his iron will. Let Russia join NATO as he once promised? Nyet. Instead, Putin suspends all dissent and threatened news media who would not follow his line. His POV? Mother Russia had strayed too far to liberalism in the 1990s; as a former head of the KGB, he wants to bring back the good old days of one-man rule.
Naturally this does not sit well with BB who realized he has created a monster. “You were nothing before I created you!” he shouts at VP. To which VP shouts back, “And now YOU are nothing!”
To be clear, the play, which captures the facts pretty accurately, merely imagines the dialogue between the two men, which was perhaps never as black-and-white or simplistic as Morgan has written it here. But “Patriots” does beg the question of who the real “patriot” is—the oligarch who wants more Western-facing activity to advance his own interests, or the dictator who believes the old way (Communist dictatorship) more closely aligns to the “real” Russia.
Stuhlbarg is a bit more antic than usual as BB. As for Putin, President Obama once compared the dictator to the bully who sits at the back of the classroom and never does his homework, and Keen captures that perfectly. Luke Thallon is excellent as the slick oligarch Roman Abramovich, ex-owner of football team Chelsea FC who unlike BB chooses to play ball with Putin. Paul Kynman not only plays Boris Yeltsin but is a ringer for him. Alex Hurt (the late William Hurt’s son) is serviceable as Alexander Litvinenko, the dissident who was poisoned in London under mysterious circumstances.
“Patriots” in short is an entertaining show both for fans of Michael Stuhlbarg and for those who eat, live, and breathe international politics. But if you want the real truth about Russian influence these days, all you need to do is glance at the morning edition of the New York Times.
Wonderful to see the Young V&A reaching far and wide!