Putin Has a Lean and Hungry Look in Patriots

The Crown creator Peter Morgan’s new play redirects his eye for palace intrigue to the power dynamics of post-Perestroika Moscow.

Peter Morgan is interested in rehumanizing that most dehumanizing of forces: power. Total authority, extreme wealth and privilege — these things turn human beings into symbols, abstract entities even to themselves. There’s a reason that Morgan’s big hit Netflix drama is called The Crown and not The Queen, and it’s not just because Morgan already wrote that movie in 2006. It’s because, as British writers have understood at least all the way back to Shakespeare, the golden round subsumes the person. Somewhere underneath the scepter or the presidential seal or the billions is someone who feels want, tastes grief, needs friends — but also, anything buried for long starts to decay. Morgan has made a career out of imagining the hidden wants and griefs of his country’s rulers, while simultaneously depicting the lavish ceremonial padding that surrounds them and keeps the plebes tuning in. It’s an addictive formula, and its own politics, rather like the souls of its characters, is markedly recessive and ambivalent. On the one hand, isn’t it good exercise for the psyche to try to see other people, however famous or flawed, in their fullness? On the other, every time we let out a sympathetic “Awww” when Margaret Thatcher shows up at Balmoral in the wrong shoes, or plays fawning nursemaid to her arrogant git of a son, are we also dulling our own impulses toward structural change? Morgan was an anti-monarchist when he began making The Crown and within a year of working on the show was talking about having become a royalist. That, as Shakespeare might say, must give us pause.

A similar combination of moral reticence and fascination with super-high status pervades Morgan’s new play Patriots, which shifts its writer’s lens from his native England to the hulking enigma of Russia. “In the West you have no idea,” says the first person to speak to us from the stage (an imposing, rather busy mash-up of red cat walk, long power-broking table, seedy nightclub, and curving, prison-like brick wall designed by Miriam Buether; “It’s giving… Meatpacking bondage with LED tape,” said the friend who saw the show with me). The speaker is Boris Berezovsky (Michael Stuhlbarg, deprived of hair but vibrating with energy), the real-life Russian oligarch who was found dead in London in 2013. The circumstances around Berezovsky’s death remain a mystery, and Morgan isn’t here to clear anything up for us. His project is to complicate—and perhaps for many, simply inform—our picture of the country that has grown more and more dangerous, isolated, authoritarian, and brutal under the termless presidency of Vladimir Putin. “You think of Russia as a cold, bleak place, full of hardship and cruelty,” Stuhlbarg’s Boris tells us before going on to elegize the quirks and beauties of his homeland. While I don’t think of Russia that way at all, I get the point: This is a Morgan joint, and we’re going to be peeling back cultural façades in search of human drama, speculating about what exactly makes up the makers of nations.

In other words, Patriots is a present-day history play, and Morgan has learned plenty from the upstart crow: His Berezovsky and Putin (played by an adenoidal, hard-staring Will Keen, whose likeness in aura to the Russian president is at times uncanny) contain echoes of Falstaff and Hal, Mark Antony and Octavius. One runs hot, brilliant, amoral, and insatiable; the other, deliberate and circumspect, cold and damp as some eyeless cave creature. Even if all this were fiction and we weren’t living in our current Putin-afflicted present, it wouldn’t take much to figure out who’s going to underestimate whom, and whose castle wall will eventually be bored through by downfall and death. The New School professor Nina L. Khrushcheva (who’s also Nikita Khrushchev’s great-granddaughter) worked with Morgan as an advisor on Patriots and described Berezovsky as “the King Lear” of the show — “the most tragic figure you can imagine.” His tragedy is personal and, more compellingly, national-turned-global: As the most powerful of Russia’s oligarchs in the 1990s, Berezovsky was closely enmeshed with Boris Yeltsin and responsible for elevating the unglamorous Putin—a mid-level bureaucrat, a “desk-jockey” and “KGB jobsworth”—first to the prime ministership and then the presidency. But, as Keen’s reptilian Putin observes, “Once a Kingmaker has made a King he has created a problem for himself.” In Morgan’s telling of the story, in trying to install a puppet, Berezovsky frees a world-destroying beast.

The crushing irony is that Berezovsky envisioned himself as an architect of the future: “Ambition is the belief that the infinite is possible,” he tells his old teacher, Professor Perelman (Ronald Guttman), before leaving the academy to parlay his work in economic decision-making theory into money-making reality. Morgan’s play jumps around in time, showing us Boris on top—all charisma and complacency, underage girlfriends and Roy Cohn–esque phone juggling—along with Boris on the rise and Boris as a shuffling math prodigy teenager, all in the lead-up to his inevitable fall. Even at the height of his wealth, sitting atop a mountain of stocks and yachts, Berezovsky crucially retains an image of himself as “a patriot trying to wake up Russia after seventy years of slumber.” At one point he tells an ambitious young trader named Roman Abramovich (Luke Thallon), “Politicians cannot save Russia … We businessmen must.” Later, to a newly anointed President Putin, he says, eyes gleaming with reconstructionist zeal, “The history of Russia and the West is a series of missed opportunities.”

Patriots’ chief pleasures are intellectual. Morgan’s work is thinky, at times witty and always distanced from judgment. It has the quality of being interesting because it’s interested, and at the heart of his play lies the paradox inherent in Berezovsky’s grand dreams for his country: Capitalism, liberalization, and cementing friendships with the West would all be personally great for an already wealthy man. When Keen’s Putin—as humorless and iron-jawed as Stuhlbarg’s Boris is roguish, hedonistic, and theatrical—snaps that “honest hard-working Russians are starving while a handful of ‘kleptocrats’ are not just rich, but obscenely rich,” how can we not agree with him? Of course, the trick is that Putin, as convinced of his own patriotism as Berezovsky, doesn’t actually care about honest hard-working Russians at all; he cares about power. And as his star rises and Berezovsky’s dims, the billionaire becomes an unlikely revolutionary. Keen won an Olivier for the role in London, and his Putin is a beady-eyed rodent visibly trying to cultivate an almost comical physical machismo. He checks and rechecks his posture in the mirror; he practices a cowboy’s stiff, bow-legged gait, one arm pinned to his side as if he’s taken an arrow in battle. At one point, he spread his legs so wide while taking center stage that I laughed out loud — for some reason, I found myself thinking of seeing Michael Flatley in Riverdance years and years ago. Every time he entered, his billowing shirt had one more button undone. Keen’s Putin is equally, embarrassingly blatant in his self-construction. It would be funny if it weren’t deeply not a joke. It’s Boris Yeltsin’s daughter, Tatiana (played by Camila Canó-Flaviá with wry self-possession), who most accurately—and most Shakspeareanly—assesses him: “He feels little. Little is dangerous. Little, in my experience, only ever wants to be perceived as big.”

Though Morgan is plenty perceptive about character, there’s something cool at the center of Patriots that begins to chafe as the play nears its end. This is not a Russian play; it’s a very British play about Russia, and Morgan’s Berezovsky is perhaps righter than even he knows. In the West, we have no idea. Nina Khrushcheva raises an eyebrow at the idea that Berezovsky committed suicide (“I am one of those people who think that you can expect everything and anything from the K.G.B.”). Alexander Litvinenko (here played by Alex Hurt), who worked for Berezovsky after denouncing and leaving the secret police, was poisoned with polonium. Russian protestors, opposition leaders, and artists are dead, in prison, and in exile. At a certain point, these stop being mere interesting facts. Perhaps in a simpler, starker container, Patriots could have overcome some of its stylish detachment, but Rupert Goold is a director who likes flash, and the dressing he adds to the script doesn’t actually help its sense of real and present stakes. There’s a lot of video on the back wall, a lot of red LED light, a lot of literal smoke and mirrors — it’s got zazz without having psychological or ethical impact.

Yet the first stage direction of Patriots is: “A bare stage.” As I left the shadows of Boris and Vladimir behind, I wondered what that version of their story might have looked like, and whether it could have become more than an exercise in (Morgan’s words) “riveting personal interactions”; whether, in its attempt to touch the Russian soul, it could have asked for more of our souls and hazarded more of its own.

Patriots is at the Barrymore Theatre.