Jeffrey Sweet–Making the Scene

Writing from London …

I wonder if Peter Morgan is familiar with a similarly titled play by Sidney Kingsley called The Patriots. In 1943, to remind America what we were fighting for during WWII, Kingsley wrote about the relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Though he was obviously on Jefferson’s side philosophically, Kingsley used the plural for his title because he believed Hamilton to be a necessary part of the founding of the United States and so also worth of the descriptor. Kingsley meant the title sincerely.

Peter Morgan’s play is also about the relationship between two figures in contest for the soul of a country, but the country in question is post-Communist Russia, and the figures are an oligarch named Boris Berezovsky and a character he promotes out of obscurity named Vladimir Putin. Morgan tells how Putin turns on Berezovsky and drives him to exile and death. Both men loudly proclaim their love for their country, but it’s evident that the word “patriots” in Morgan’s title is intended as irony.

Morgan has made a substantial career out of finding the personal drama in public events, most notably finding a movie, a play and several seasons of TV drama out of Queen Elizabeth II’s life – a neat trick since she was very careful about expressing almost nothing of her personal feelings. A small industry of historians and critics have taken issue with this or that dramatization. I am not an expert (I’m barely conversant) on recent Russian history, but Morgan tells a good story. A variation of the Frankenstein story. Berezovsky, in Morgan’s telling, promotes Putin in the expectation that he will be able to use him as a tool for his own interests. Putin (like Mary Shelley’s monster) breaks free of his creator and destroys him.

I admire the play and the performances of Tom Hollander and Will Keen as Berezofsky and Putin. Having read the script, I admire, too, how director Rupert Goold’s staging gives caffeine-like jolts to what reads as a series of extended dialogues. I have one reservation. Well, not a reservation but an observation. I recently watched the video of David Hare’s Straight Line Crazy, a play about Robert Moses, and I remember Hare and Howard Brenton’s Pravda, a portrait of a monstrous press baron from South Africa based on the late Robert Maxwell. The voices of these two and Berezovsky’s strike me as being similar – shouty men who have opening monologues in which they invoke images of nature as they directly lobby the audience to buy their megalomaniac visions. This is not so much a criticism as an observation that this has become … a convention? I mean, it works, but …