Vladimir Putin owes his power to the stage. The president’s closest advisor trained as a theatre director before applying his art to politics, and ran Russia like a staged reality, spinning so many…
,” “Enron”), “A Very Expensive Poison” applies Putinesque tactics to a true story. In November 2006, Alexander Litvinenko lay dying in a British hospital bed, propped up on white pillows as his photo was taken. His bare chest is stickered with heart monitors and his head is hairless, eyebrows and all, a symptom of radiation poisoning. A former Russian security officer — and a defector newly granted British citizenship — he had ingested tea spiked with a radioactive isotope, Polonium 210.
This, though, is a true story told in post-truth times and Prebble disrupts with disinformation, distortion and distraction — layer on layer of Putinesque theatricality. It’s not only that she foregrounds Marina Litvinenko’s narration, with actress MyAnna Buring stepping downstage to prod our sympathies with direct address: Prebble slowly amps up the artifice altogether. Characters step out of scenes to dispute their own representation. Factual events tailspin beyond the bounds of credibility.
Effectively, Putin steps out of the stage picture — further out, even, than Burling’s Marina. At times he seems to be directing proceedings, ordering Lloyd Hutchinson and Michael Shaeffer’s fumbling assassins to clown around, or sending top-hatted and tailcoated tap dancers to storm the stage at crucial moments of the criminal investigation.
What, then, is the real point? Most potently, it points a finger of blame at Britain itself. Litvinenko was a British citizen, murdered on British soil, and Prebble scrubs his name absolutely clear, eradicating any lingering associations with Russian spying. Her play reserves its outrage for a complacent, compliant British establishment that failed to assemble a public inquiry for fear of losing Russian investment. That, not a penful of polonium, is the very expensive poison in question.
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