I met Boris Berezovsky, the dark star of Peter Morgan’s West End transfer, Patriots, in circumstances as bizarre as the man himself.

A squat mathematician who had excelled as a student of theories of infinity, Berezovsky came to embody the corruption and machinations of post-communist Russia. In the 1990s, covering the hardscrabble Yeltsin years, he had a controlling interest in the main Russian TV station, where the corpse count mounted in the struggles to control the airwaves and advertising revenues.

Of the many oligarchs who strutted the stage of Russia’s politics between the chaos of the transition to a market economy slanted in the interests of rapacious buccaneers and the rise of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship, he was also one of the figures most determined to involve himself in Kremlin power play. Not a recipe for a long life, it turned out.

Overtly critical of the new leader’s consolidation of power and resentful of competitors, he was being frozen out in the early 2000s and decided to court favourable press in the West.

His aide told me he only had the numbers of two journalists, including mine. When I explained I was at home, just having given birth, he decreed he would come and see me there, which entailed a goon squad of security men tramping through the house and interrupting the interview when he found questions unappealing.

He was not remotely likeable. But as an insight into how a driven man sought to ride the rapids of power shifts, hang on to a fortune made in the rough and tumble of the auto trade (in the course of which he survived an attempt to blow him up, ironically via a car bomb), he was riveting material.

Peter Morgan (the dramatist behind The Queen and The Crown) clearly had the same thought and Rupert Goold’s production with Tom Hollander as Berezovsky captures much of the man I met — the arrogance, risk-taking swagger and somewhere in the mix, a sense of patriotism which led him into clashes others were wise enough to avoid.

The Motherland demands the patriotism of conflict, power, and ultimately, war, as the test of loyalty

Will Keen is an icy-faced Putin — a hard role to take on while the impassive, bloated features are now so familiar to us all, but an apt study of the Russian leader’s mix of menace and rigid body language (Putin, as a joke once went about his rigidity, “is a man wearing someone else’s arms”).

Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon) brings the strange impassivity of the former Chelsea FC-owner’s potato-face to life. He is, it is suggested, the one who will survive the game of thrones for longest, because no one really knows what he stands for.

Miriam Buether’s set is Russian patriotic red and black — at times morphing into a seedy nightclub (Berezovsky frequented plenty of those), sometimes the antiseptic milieu of Kremlin’s offices, where filing cabinets conceal escape routes and secret passages on its multiple levels — a visual evocation of the Kremlin’s impenetrability.

Everywhere, the image of an overbearing Russian ideal looms. The Motherland demands the patriotism of conflict, power, and ultimately, war, as the test of loyalty.

Of course, we see this gloomy story of the past three decades through the prism of Ukraine and the internecine feuds of the 2000s can feel like a mere warm-up to the urgent drama of Russia’s impact on its neighbours and the global disorder it has helped wreak.

One criticism of the plot might well be that Berezovsky’s professed anxiety about Putin’s autocracy is hard to disentangle from his tireless desire to settle scores, using Alexander Litvinenko as a pawn in a game which cost the latter his life. It was, however, all-consuming.

Lenin’s “Kto kovo?” (Who [has power over] whom?) was resolved in favour of Putin politically and Abramovich financially, when Abramovich bankrupted Berezovsky after besting him in a court case in London in 2012.

The failed kingmaker was found dead in his Berkshire home by suicide shortly afterwards and the Putin machine ground on, destroying its enemies and honing its resentments.

Another bout of fratricidal competition and fatalities beckons in a summer refresh of Romeo and Juliet at the Almeida, in the hands of Rebecca Frecknall, a director with a knack for breathing irreverent life into classics, latterly in a Streetcar Named Desire reinterpretation and a bankable Cabaret.

This time, it is Romeo (Toheeb Jimoh) and Juliet (Isis Hainsworth) who get a do-over in a version of the star-cross’d tale that brings out their youth and impetuosity. Juliet stamps her feet, pouts and screams like a female version of that parody of adolescence, Kevin the Teenager.

Jimoh is all haste and desire, rushing his lines to the point where their beauty is submerged in his urgency. Frecknall’s playful tone and casting of raw young actors remind us that on top of all the feuding, it is their father’s channelling of grief into anger after Tybalt’s death which causes the helter-skelter acceleration of events.

Jack Riddiford’s camp, threatening Mercutio is the university-mate-from-hell, making everything worse while indulging a homoerotic fixation on Romeo. If it is a bit broad, in reinterpreting the Bard to fit into the mores of the 2020s, there’s nevertheless a restless energy to this outing. Heavily-armed oligarchs with a grudge, it turns out, are a recipe for trouble, whether they hail from Moscow or Verona.

---

This article is taken from the August-September 2023 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.