Peter Morgan’s “Patriots” are “the crown” of the Kremlin

As fans of The Crown know well, British writer Peter Morgan is singularly adept at explaining how the most basic human emotions, pride, spite, greed, sexual need and raging insecurity, have an impact on magnificent world events. In Patriots, Morgan's new Broadway play, he turns his attention to the Kremlin and the rise, yet unseen, of the obscure deputy mayor who became one of the world's most ruthless despots: Vladimir Putin. .

Patriots, a gripping and juicy drama filled with a terrifying performance from Will Keen as a Richard III-style you-know-who, offers a concocted history of Russia from the 1990s era of bumbling Boris Yeltsin to the present day. Its central dramatic question: how did Putin get there?

The answer, Morgan suggests, is inextricably linked to the rise of so-called Russian oligarchs, who took advantage of the fall of communism for their own epic material gain, seizing former state assets like utilities and television channels and spending the windfall profits on megayachts. sailing the Mediterranean with complete impunity.

Such was their power, Patriots implies, that these hyper-rich Russians came to believe they could also control the Kremlin, especially if they installed one of their own to do their bidding like stupid old Vlad, a reliable apparatchik who could be trusted to carry out their orders. .

Unfortunately for businessmen like Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg), the storyteller here, who makes Putin go rogue.

The oligarchs failed to realize that the old Soviet methods were still in place, including the state apparatus of open and covert murder.

All kinds of hell rained down on their heads. Some clever people recalibrated with the new big dog: notably, here, Romain Abramovich (Luke Thallon), a name notoriously familiar to the British public, at least because he once owned Chelsea Football Club.

This is the triangular conflict of the play: Berezovsky, who died in Britain in suspicious circumstances in 2013, helps Putin and Abramovich, before being stabbed twice in the back. What's particularly distinctive about this play is that its most sympathetic character, Berezovsky, really isn't that sympathetic. After all, he is an oligarch and a mathematician who simply miscalculated. In doing so, he unleashed on the world a murderous dictator who sent tanks into Ukraine.

Stuhlbarg is a talkative, slightly awkward actor who fits Morgan's character design like a fur-lined glove as the thrill of money and power leads him to distance himself from his professor mentor (played by Ronald Guttman) . Morgan is clearly fascinated by the hows and whys of how such an intelligent man made one of the greatest errors of judgment of the modern political era.

Michael Stuhlbarg as Boris Berezovsky in “Patriots” on Broadway. (Matthew Murphy)

The public will probably share this interest, thanks to a lively production of Rupert Goold and a uniformly excellent cast that includes Stella Baker as Marina Litvinenko and Alex Hurt as her husband Alexander. The latter is the Russian dissident who coined the term mafia state and who was poisoned in London in 2006. On his deathbed he blamed Putin.

Patriots has the scale of a Shakespearean history play and many of the same points of conflict. But Goold, long fond of a certain trashy beauty in the theater, fuels these trends and adds spice to Broadway.

Morgan's characters sometimes explain themselves as if they were skimming Wikipedia entries. As with The Crown, these stories always run the risk of giving people the impression that they are watching historical fact and not a dramatic interpretation with imaginary dialogue. But very few people know Putin's story; as such, Patriots is a useful and cautionary tale with unintended consequences.