“A Very Expensive Poison” at the Old Vic
Neil Dowden on the South Bank
6 September 2019
Lucy Prebble’s brilliantly inventive new play A Very Expensive Poison is about the 2006 assassination of Russian whistle-blower and defector Alexander Litvinenko in London using the radioactive element polonium-210. After much delay (with the British government blocking an inquest, as they did not want to antagonize relations with Russia), a public inquiry concluded in 2016 that not only was Litvinenko poisoned by Russian security agents Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun but that this was “probably approved by” President Vladimir Putin.
As an officer in the FSB, Litvinenko angered the authorities by publicly exposing the links between organized crime and the Russian government. This led to trumped-up charges against him so that he fled with his family to Britain. There he continued his expose of Russian state corruption and also acted as a consultant to the British Secret Service. Regarded as a traitor by his former bosses, Litvinenko was aware of the danger of being assassinated. There were two failed attempts to poison him, but the Russian agents eventually succeeded by inserting polonium into tea that he drank in a smart London hotel.
Prebble has used a clever, meta-theatrical structure with overlapping timelines, mixing fact with fantasy. Acting as detective to his own murder, Litvinenko reveals to British intelligence and police officers the trail left by radioactive poison across London. To explain why he was targeted, Alexander and his wife Marina re-create scenes from their own past in Moscow (though sometimes disagreeing on details), as the British investigators look on as witnesses from the present. But in the second half of the show, Vladimir Putin himself hijacks the narrative to put a radically different spin on events and directs proceedings on stage from a box above the stalls.
A Very Expensive Poison also delves into political history. lt shows how, after the collapse of the communist Soviet Union and the failed hopes of glasnost and perestroika, the country relapsed into authoritarianism under Putin — while also raising the question if the West’s expansive foreign policy was partly responsible for the resurgence of Russian nationalism. Characters often share their own perspectives directly with the audience, and so the search for truth uncovers different versions of what happened (including the propaganda of Putin, an unreliable narrator in a post-truth world). indeed, the play is an ingenious examination of storytelling itself.
Like Prebble’s hit 2009 play Enron (about the financial scandal and collapse of the titular US energy company), this is far from being a dry documentary. lt gives a very accessible, entertaining account of complex current affairs. A Very Expensive Poison features song and dance sequences, giant puppets of Soviet leaders, and a shadow play depicting the development of polonium-210 (derived from uranium ores produced in nuclear reactors).
Although the play uses research from the eponymous book by Guardian journalist Luke Harding, Prebble’s approach is very different, making it a completely theatrical experience. For such a disturbing tale, it is often surprisingly funny (including the bumbling incompetence of the assassins) with surreal humour echoing an essentially absurd situation. But the play is also moving at times as Marina struggles to obtain justice for her dead husband. Amidst the global power politics, the love between Marina and Alexander shows a human drama at the heart of the story.
There is never a dull moment in John Crowley’s dynamic production. It is thought-provoking in a playful way but doesn’t dumb down important issues. With a highly flexible set mirroring the play’s shifting realities, designer Tom Scutt slickly moves the action from hospital room to Moscow apartment to hotel restaurant to police station.
The fifteen-strong cast is well led by Tom Brooke as the courageous and even reckless Alexander on a mission and MyAnna Buring as the loyal and dignified Marina who appeals directly to the audience’s sense of fair play. Having established a gentle emotional relationship that counterpoints ruthless state revenge, the two actors step out of character near the end to read out verbatim findings from the public inquiry.
Reece Shearsmith gives a terrific, grotesquely comic performance as the cold-blooded Putin who like a puppet master manipulates those around him and cynically spreads fake news (as well as mocking the show’s programme and the Old Vic’s temporary toilets). Michael Shaeffer and Lloyd Hutchinson amusingly play Lugovoi and Kovtun as amateurish spies like a comedy double act. Peter Polycarpou is the larger-than-life oligarch Boris Berezovsky who bursts into song. And there is staunch support from Gavin Spokes as the investigating detective and Thomas Arnold as a sympathetic lawyer who helps the determined Marina in her quest for justice for her husband.
Of course the Litvinenko poisoning has strong parallels with notorious events last year when two Russian spies tried to kill double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia with the Novichok nerve agent in Salisbury. But the track record goes back to the Cold War Soviet era, when Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov was murdered with a poisoned umbrella tip on London’s Waterloo Bridge in 1978. lt seems that unless lessons are learned history is doomed to repeat itself.
