![A group of people on a stage
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The Ensemble of Patriots
(Photo: Matthew Murphy)
Patriots
By Marc Miller
It's
a constant issue with Peter Morgan: How much are we to believe? The playwright/
screenwriter/ TV writer traffics in dramatizations of 20th and 21st
century historic figures and is responsible for, among other works, The
Queen, The Crown, Frost/Nixon, and The Audience. So...
the guy's good. But we're always left guessing as to how much of the conflicts
he dramatizes among heads of state and their retinue is documented, and how
much sprang out of his fertile imagination.
So
it is with Patriots, Morgan's West End import detailing the rise and
precipitous fall of Boris Berezovsky, the Russian billionaire, business
oligarch, and genius mathematician. If you don't come to Patriots
steeped in knowledge of recent Russian history, and I didn't, you may be a
little lost at first. It does sort itself out, and you get an education, as
well as some fairly potent drama. It just never quite catches fire.
But
Michael Stuhlbarg, our Berezovsky, sure does. After a brief and somewhat
pointless prologue, with Boris's mom (Rosie Benton) being apprised of her
nine-year-old son's gift for numbers, we're thrust into Club Logovaz, a profitable,
decadent niterie the fiftyish Berezovsky runs. There, as Morgan's script has it,
he is "doing what he always seems to be doing: five things at once." Stuhlbarg,
looking quite a lot like the real article, offers a sensationally detailed
performance, loose-limbed and effusive, and with maybe the most expressive
speaking voice on Broadway right now. We get immediately that Berezovsky is an
operator, a skilled one, sweeping aside personal issues with his wife and
daughter while setting up business deals.
Currently
the self-described "most powerful man in Russia," he's trying to build a car
dealership in St. Petersburg, and that means negotiating with its deputy mayor,
one Vladimir Putin (Will Keen). Here's where the evening's one shock comes in:
Putin is, at this mid-'90s point, a colorless functionary, averse to bribes and
on the timid side, despite his KGB background.
![A person standing on a stage with a person in a suit
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Michael Stuhlbarg, Will Keen (Photo: Matthew Murphy)
Much
of what follows is a chronicle of the evolving, souring Putin-Berezovsky
relationship. Boris mentors him, pushing him into the Yeltsin administration
and up the ladder to the presidency, where he mistakenly assumes Putin will
further his own ambitions to westernize Russia. What starts as a mutually
supportive pairing turns into cold hate and Berezovsky's undoing-mostly because,
if we're to believe Morgan, Berezovsky resented Putin being, to his way of
thinking, insufficiently grateful.
There's
much more. Berezovsky lures Alexander Litvinenko (Alex Hurt) from the Federal
Security Service into his employ, where he's fatally poisoned by forces
probably under Putin's thumb. He teams with the young would-be oligarch Roman
Abramovich (Luke Thallon) to acquire the oil giant Sibneft, turning both into
billionaires, until more Putin machinations, with Abramovich's aid, divest
Berezovsky of his entire fortune. He buys a controlling interest in the state
TV channel, only to lose it to Abramovich. And he maintains a touching
cordiality with his old math prof (Ronald Guttman), a philosophical type who is
contented with his lot, in marked contrast to our protagonist.
Women
don't count for much in this universe. We never even find out what happens to
Mrs. Berezovsky (they divorced, and he remarried), and while Stella Baker,
Marianna Gailus, and Camila Canó-Flavia fill out the cast, they haven't much to
do; Baker is a suitably worried Mrs. Litvinenko, and Gailus amusingly impersonates
a TV anchor whose principles turn on a dime. We also get that Berezovsky is
into the ladies, young ones. But all we see of that is an encounter with a
Russian bimbo, who falls asleep while he's on the phone. Which he is a lot.
How
much of the Boris-Vladimir antipathy, if any, stemmed from Berezovsky's being a
Jew, and a grasping, antisemitic-stereotype one at that? It's not clear, and
entertaining as Keen's transition from milquetoast official to, well, Vladimir
Putin is, we don't see inside his soul (maybe he doesn't have one). As for
Berezovsky, Stuhlbarg is nothing if not expert, but the character careens from
naked ambition to bullying imperviousness to crafty negotiation to justified
self-pity to a certain amount of charm, only when necessary.
![A person standing on a stage with a person in a suit
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Will Keen (Photo: Michael Murphy)
It's
a workout, but once these qualities are revealed, there's not a lot of variance
to Boris Berezovsky, and director Rupert Goold seems over-reliant on
Stuhlbarg's virtuosity to keep us engrossed. He also presides over a visually
unstimulating production, with Miriam Buether's unexciting unit set, Buether and
Deborah Andrews' accurate-enough period costumes, and Jack Knowles' lighting,
which emphasizes the red. Well, it is Russia.
I was always
interested, but never riveted. Patriots is exhaustive in its surveying
of the petty disagreements and larger philosophical differences that helped
shape Russian politics from the '90s to the present, and there's perhaps some
comforting validation in witnessing a superpower that's even more corrupt and
immoral than the one we're living in. But Morgan's eye for detail-so much
historical minutiae, so many subsidiary characters-can be exhausting. He's not
big on humor. And when the central conflict boils down to who helped whom how,
and how thankful the beneficiary should be, we're left a little hungry.
Patriots
At the Ethel Barrymore Theatre,
243 W. 47th
St.
Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes
Tickets: patriotsbroadway.com