The character is called Mr President. He’s a fussy little man who walks briskly down a red carpet. The Russian national anthem is a clue, as are the golden Kremlin doors. Yes, it’s Vladimir Putin, making an appearance on a London stage in A Very Expensive Poison, Lucy Prebble’s reimagining of the story of the dissident Alexander Litvinenko’s murder by Russia’s FSB spy agency, based on my 2016 book.
Reece Shearsmith plays Mr President with dark charm. He addresses the audience directly. “Whenever you tell a story you tell a lie,” he begins. He offers an alternative version of Litvinenko’s ghoulish killing. Instead of being poisoned with radioactive tea, Litvinenko lives out a happy family life in a cottage with his cat Yuri, Putin says.
On the banks of the Volga. In the background a dog barks. The scene is marvellously chilling. Mr President is compelling. He has the best lines, including a gag about the only “crime” being the cost of the theatre programme and the Old Vic makeshift loo arrangements, and we laugh with him.
But does this make us complicit in his deeds? Mr President is everywhere and nowhere. He offers quips from the balcony. He appears at Litvinenko’s death bed, robed in a hazmat protection suit.
Once conman leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle
Prebble has written a play for our age. Her Mr President is an alluring populist who deftly uses humour to achieve his goals. He captures our post-modern moment in which unscrupulous off-stage politicians have realised – or perhaps rediscovered – that truth is for suckers. What matters is narrative. Tell a beguiling story, a fairytale even, with a neat slogan, and the voters will trust and reward you.
Once con man leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle. My favourite scene in Prebble’s hugely enjoyable production comes when two British representatives – a detective and a lawyer – come to arrest Litvinenko’s killers. What happens next is a piece of messy meta-genius. We see a trail of luminous polonium handprints, a dance routine in which the murderers flee, shuffling off stage right, and a poignant last waltz.
In 1998 the actual Litvinenko, an intelligence officer, met Putin, his new boss. Litvinenko had denounced his own FSB agency and accused its leadership of corruption and crimes. His reward was suspension, threats, arrest. He escaped to Britain. In exile, he believed himself safe, a British citizen. He worked for his old patron Boris Berezovsky – a beguiling figure, in Prebble’s version, who bursts into oligarch song.
On stage, Putin appears in the Litvinenkos’ flat, alone. He picks up an ashtray from the table and casually repositions it on the floor. It’s a small and sinister gesture. Prebble’s message: we, the audience, need to pay attention. Details matter, especially in dark times like ours.
I had my own ashtray moment. I arrived in Moscow soon after Litvinenko’s murder in November 2006 and flew on one of the planes used to transport polonium. Was the Russian state behind his death? My question led to a break-in and other intrusions. On one occasion, FSB ghosts opened the window next to our small son’s bed. We lived on the 10th floor. The message seemed to be saying: take care, or your kid might tumble out.
Putin began by embracing the west. Now, he wants revenge | Angus Roxburgh
Putin refused to extradite the murderers – Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun. Lugovoi became a deputy in the state Duma. He even won a medal.
The play uses evidence revealed in 2015 at a public inquiry.The hitmen were idiot villains, it emerged. They took three attempts to get their victim and visited an erotic nightclub – a Soho scene wonderfully reimagined by Prebble, with glitter ball and golden phallus. The actual killers may be far away, but A Very Expensive Poison suggests that art can be its own form of justice. The judge who presided over the public inquiry, Sir Robert Owen, concluded that Putin had “probably” approved the assassination. Owen’s words and Litvinenko’s death-bed testimony appear in the play’s moving closing section. As do the words of Theresa May, who as home secretary, at first refused an inquiry.
The Litvinenko story is many things: a horror story from the cold war transplanted to 21st-century London, a parable of Russia’s dark return to authoritarianism, a tale of Jacobean revenge, gruesomely done. It is also a human drama. It is about love and loss. At its centre is Marina Litvinenko – a woman trying to navigate her way to the truth, across a treacherous sea of lies and temporising.