Will Keen, Luke Thallon, and Michael Stuhlbarg in Patriots. Photo: © Michael Murphy
Anton Chekhov’s oft-quoted dictum about a gun—if you show it in the first act you’d better use it in the second—is adhered to religiously in Peter Morgan’s gripping new play, Patriots, now playing at the Barrymore Theatre. But in Morgan’s drama, in place of a gun there is Vladimir Putin. From the moment he is introduced, it is clearly only a matter of time until he goes off. And when he does (spoiler alert!), it does not disappoint.
The play tells the real (albeit with artistic license) parallel stories of the downfall of oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg) and the rise of deputy mayor turned taxi driver Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Will Keen). In the first act, Berezovsky, a gifted mathematician and one of the richest people in 1990s Russia, holds all the cards. He is the kingmaker, and elevates Putin to prime minister, believing he can control him. But act two sees Putin flex his power. After Berezovsky criticizes Putin publicly, Putin drives him from Russia, turns his fellow oligarch and friend Roman Abramovich against him, impoverishes him, and finally (probably) has him murdered.
As the title suggests, the question of what it means to be a patriot is at the play’s core. To Putin, it means loving Russia (and, by extension, him) unconditionally. For Berezovsky, it means recognizing his country’s flaws and working to improve them. But the two definitions are fundamentally incompatible. It’s style versus substance. To Berezovsky, Putin’s brand of patriotism denigrates Russia; Berezovsky’s is a threat that Putin cannot tolerate. The president tells the oligarch that he has grown tired of “your treason and treachery, of your criminality and your disloyalty, of your perfidy and your whining and your thieving and your bribes and your decadence—all of which you dress up as patriotism.”
Underlying this didactic discussion is a more visceral struggle. The play is a study of power: political power, economic power, but mostly that intangible contest for dominance between two individuals (here almost always men). Berezovsky dominates or is dominated by Putin, Abramovich, his mistress, political operatives, assistants—and that’s just in the first scene. Here, only power ultimately matters—everything else, including patriotism, is secondary.
Power’s supremacy is clearest when compared to loyalty, a quality both men make a show of embracing but dismiss in practice. When Putin asks rhetorically, “What is a man without loyalty?” Berezovsky answers, “Rich, usually.” But when the oligarch demands Putin’s loyalty in act two, Putin claims he owes Berezovsky nothing. Putin later reflects on the other man’s difficulty adjusting to the new paradigm. “Once a kingmaker has made a king he has created a problem for himself. He has created someone to whom he has to bow down.”
Berezovsky leaves Russia in exile, decrying the antidemocratic direction in which his rival is taking the country. But the play is agnostic as to whether Berezovsky is more upset by Putin’s rise to power or his own fall from grace. It was Berezovsky, after all, who just a few scenes earlier, undermined elections to retain his own hold on power.
Michael Stuhlbarg does a masterful job portraying Berezovsky’s many contradictions. He is ingratiating and charismatic, controlling and chaotic, a long-range planner who studies decision-making yet can be incredibly shortsighted. Playing his foil, Will Keen makes Putin humorless and shallow and believably dangerous. Third lead Luke Thallon also turns in a fine performance as Abramovich, the oligarch caught between them, displaying both puppyish excitement and, when things get dark, the countenance of an undertaker. The supporting cast is equally strong. Director Rupert Goold keeps the pace up so that the three-hour production rarely drags. He also does a great job allowing for crescendos and quiet moments—a feat given how many key scenes the play has.
The production is visually stunning. Jack Knowles’s lighting is especially striking, evoking Soviet brutalist architecture with its showcasing of PAR lamps and their sharp lines. Set designer Miriam Buether’s creative semicircular, modular brick wall creates a mood and her costumes (designed along with Deborah Andrews) are effective extensions of character. Sound and music by Adam Cork enhance the action.
My one minor bone to pick is with this production’s use of live video. Throughout the play, actors’ faces are projected on the wall, highly stylized, larger than life. It’s creative, yes, but it distracts from the action more than not. There’s a moment in act two when Putin struggles to keep his emotions in check. We get a two-story view of his quivering face, a glimpse into Putin’s soul, but that giant rendition makes it feel like the actor is chewing the scenery. By relying on the extreme close up, the director underestimates the audience and the actor.
This production is hardly the first to incorporate live video (in fact, it’s the second show I’ve seen this week that does so). But the technique has become ubiquitous, bordering on universal, and it almost always feels gimmicky. Let film and television have their close-ups. Theater’s advantage is that it can display the whole body, the mise en scene. Telling us where to look—isn’t that a little too Putin-like?