REVIEW: A Very Expensive Poison, People's Theatre
A very Russian outrage
Lucy Prebble’s play about the Litvinenko outrage is an ambitious undertaking for any theatre company but the People’s amateurs never shirk a challenge.
This is an impressive first staging in the region of a serious drama which makes its point on occasion by feigning frivolity – Putin as sarky music hall compère, a troupe of dancers and an oligarch (John MacDonald as a larger-then-life Boris Bereszovsky) who disconcertingly bursts into song.
Steven Wallace’s production gives us a suitably menacing set, the stage bisected across its width with a prison-like metal wall, and even during the interval the foyer exits are barred by ‘thugs’ in black balaclavas.
Inspired by Luke Harding’s book about the case, Prebble’s award-winning drama spins away from the world of investigative journalism (his) into colourful theatricality (hers) without losing sight of the central fact – that a British citizen was murdered on British soil by agents of a hostile state.
It almost happened again in 2018, of course, although this time the target, Sergei Skripal, survived (Dawn Sturgess wasn’t so lucky, her death a tragic unintended consequence).
The play begins in fairly mundane circumstances, Alexander Litvinenko in hospital A&E accompanied by wife Marina, more concerned than he is by his sudden bout of sickness.
Tony Sehgal and Sara Jo Harrison give assured performances as the couple whose fortunes we follow both in flashback, as defectors planning new lives in Britain, and after the attack.
Litvinenko, a former Russian secret service agent who criticised Putin’s “mafia state”, was fatally poisoned in 2006 by assassins who put a radioactive isotope in his tea in a London hotel.
It took a long while for hospital staff to come up with a diagnosis and even longer for the Government to initiate any kind of meaningful inquiry.
It falls to the indomitable Marina, as Alexander lies dying in a hospital bed, to push for some semblance of justice, supported by lawyer Ben Emmerson (also well played by Paul Carding) who has to tell her a public inquest has been denied.
There’s a reluctance, it seems, to upset or provoke Russia. Chris Grayling, who as Justice Secretary denied Marina Litvinenko legal aid, is recalled by the lawyer in unflattering terms: “He really is a colossal tit.”
The ins and outs of this saga are conveyed in some detail and it’s grimly fascinating stuff.
It all goes vaudevillian on us when Putin appears (slickly manifested by Craig Fairbairn, as it’s said others are obliged to do in Russia, doubling for the monster in public).
Boy, he’s a smarmy bastard! As smarmy as the two assassins are blunderingly cack-handed, although we can’t call them ineffectual because they did achieve their aim.
Take a bow, Andrei Lugovoi and Dimitri Kovtun, brought to life as complete clowns by Tim Clark and Jack Thompson, the latter making his way to the stage by struggling through the audience.
My problem with the show is that Putin and his henchmen, even when being sent up, don’t make me laugh, or even want to. So there was a kind of disconnect for me.
I can appreciate a production that’s supremely well done, as this is, but it left me unsettled. Perhaps that’s the play’s intention. It’s also quite long, ending on Wednesday at 10.20pm rather than the ‘around 10pm’ stated in the programme.
I was keen to get out and kick a (metaphorical) cat!
A Very Expensive Poison runs until Saturday, March 28. Tickets from the People’s Theatre website.