“Patriots”, National Theater Brno
Dana Rufolo in the Czech Republic
29 May 2025
Patriots by stage and screen writer Peter Morgan is a historic drama on the life and suicide of the Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky which premiered in Britain at the Almeida Theatre in 2022 and then transferred to New York.
Photo credit: Jakub Joch.
It is in the repertoire of the National Theater Brno (Národni divadlo Brno, NdB) under the Czech title Vlastenci, and was also shown during the “Theatre World Brno” festival which runs from 17 until 28 May, 2025.
Given world affairs today and the Czech Republic’s proximity to the Russian state, it is understandable that the national theatre wished to revive Patriots, because it accurately shows how Berezovsky convinced President Boris Yeltsin to choose Vladimir Putin as Russia’s president on the last day of 1999 and therefore unwittingly set off the chain of events leading to Putin’s rise to power and his autocratic decisions from which we are all reeling today.
Morgan’s play Patriots is structured in a filmic style, with a succession of nervous short scenes that tell the story of corruption, competitiveness, and male friendship or – more frequently – antagonism by focusing on pivotal moments in complex historic events. Consequently, there is little time for psychological development of character except for the general theme of the play which, as I interpret it, is that all Russians have a deep attachment to their homeland and that the oligarchs as well as Putin himself all consider themselves to be Russian patriots.
The director Jakub Šmíd chose to interpret Patriots in ways that bring out its theatricality and dampens the filmic “snapshot” feel of the script. He introduces two dance scenes, interludes in the classical sense, featuring stick-dancing and a regression to primitive expressivity; they infuse a cabalistic feeling into the taut monetary and political exchanges between the oligarchs and political figures.
There is a scene late in the second act of the play where Berezovsky storms into Putin’s presidential office and berates him for having not respected Berezovsky’s efforts that put him into office. Putin is being badgered by Berezovsky in Morgan’s play itself, but it is Šmíd who adds a tremendously powerful scene where Putin’s cold indifference awakens Berezovsky’s rage, and he strangles Putin who barely escapes, choking. This is not a historical fact, but the physical onstage confrontation tells us that this is a fight to the finish.
Photo credit: Jakub Joch.
When film is used in Patriots, it enhances the role of the actors. For instance, a camera zooms in on the unblinking steel-blue eyes of the actor playing Putin, reinforcing his cold character. Berezovsky was a mathematics prodigy discovered at age nine, and he is portrayed as having studied with Professor Grigori Perelman, played as a gentle grandfatherly man by Bedřich Výtisk (this last is dramatic license not supported by historic fact). The scenes of them meeting at Perelman’s apartment to discuss infinity is filmed in a low-key grey tone that in no way draws attention to the art of the film as a medium. Rather, its lack of ostentation allows us to concentrate on the dialogue and relationship between these two people. It is the best use of film in the theatre that I have seen.
The set for this production at the Mahen National Theatre is an open stage encircled by a wall that is being painted blue by poor proletariat workers as the play begins, a track for an industrial grade trolly that represents various moving vehicles including expensive luxury automobiles (the dissonance is amusing) and a rectangular pit that is Putin’s office once he has come to power. It contains a desk and a wall of formidable looking metal objects that resemble warheads. Later, an interior warehouse in the UK is created on a flat stage with a truck with a hydraulic lift which allows Berezovsky to hang himself from a beam in the ceiling.
Patriots is conventional in structure with the steady diminishment of Berezovsky’s fortune being its dramatic throughline. There is no major conflict, as Putin is aloof from Berezovsky and does not need to confront him on a personal level. What we see is a man who believes he is a patriot and even a savior of Russia losing his fortune and even his country. Berezovsky is exiled and lives in the UK where he works as a labourer and eventually, as mentioned above, where he commits suicide. (Morgan decided to depict Berezovsky definitively committing suicide when in exile, but the facts are more ambiguous.) In the downward spiral, Putin wins and Berezovsky loses, but the win for Putin is abstract: he represents a system. In effect, it is the system that wins.
Patriots at the National Theatre of Brno achieves dramatic intensity through the endless scenes of confrontation between the characters. Šmíd capitalizes on this by having his actors, members of the theatre’s ensemble, create as remarkable and realistic figures as possible, given the script. We in the audience are convinced that the historical personages we see on stage are true to life.
The character of Putin is the most subtle. The nickname Berezovsky gives him early on, “The Kid”, belies the hostile, insidious nature that he gradually reveals. Viktor Kuzník who plays the role is a slim, slight man; his soft-spoken demeanor and mincing movements call Putin to mind. He speaks quietly but emphatically; each word he says is clear and the words follow one another in a regular cadence, slowly. His movements are constrained and deliberate.
The playwright has perhaps exaggerated Putin’s sensitivity to his own small stature, but it provides some insight when Putin is worried that the desk he has been given as President of Russia is extremely large: “Won’t it make me look small?” (This was a laugh line for the audience.) Otherwise, Putin is a shell of a person with no leaks of thought or feeling whatsoever. Even when Berezovsky nearly strangles Putin, furious because Putin is showing no gratitude and is cutting Berezovsky out of the power elite, he recovers from the assault with cool detachment – a few coughs and a touch of his neck is all.
Berezovsky on the other hand is larger than life. Played by Tomáš Šulaj as a choleric individual who is charismatic, clever, and impassioned but whose moods are unpredictable, he constantly defines his own reality. Switching from a normal rational person who you can believe has a doctorate in decision-making theory to one who shouts and blusters, from the distance of the stage he is fascinating. However, if you were in his presence in reality inside the small room of a business office or a home, he must have been a rather frightening and formidable character. Very Dostoyevskian, perhaps, but certainly someone whom Putin would have put a front up to in order to advance his personal ambitions. Yeltsin must have been relieved that Berezovsky’s choice for President was fundamentally unlike Berezovsky himself.
Berezovsky promises to promote Putin as future President of Russia if Putin, then head of the FSB, releases Alexander Litvinenko (an FSB member who at one time had been in charge of Berezovsky’s security) from prison. But Boris Yeltsin could have chosen someone else. How different the world’s fate would have been if someone more like Berezovsky who was open to the West had taken over leadership of Russia! Perhaps in his alcoholic stupor – and Yeltsin played by Roman Nevěčný always had a bottle dangling from his hand – was not considering the disadvantage of having a leader who snapped quickly into loud tantrums, but in so far as we see Berezovsky on stage, it seems that his personality would have been a stumbling block to the kind of soft-spoken underhanded international diplomacy that Russia has benefited from in the last 30 years. He loves Russia he says; what he forgot to say is that he loved Russia in his own flamboyant incautious way. Nonetheless, as a reminder of the force of nostalgia, the song that opens and closes the play about how a Russian can never be happy living in exile applies to him.
Women only have cameo roles in Patriots. Boris’s estranged wife who begs him to give their teenaged daughter a talking-to he never has the time for, and the teenaged daughter herself, who is pulled around by her mother and possesses not an ounce of gravitas, are both pale, confused characters.
A Russian call girl in New York is another stereotyped female presence; she stays just long enough to steal the wallet from sleeping Boris’s pocket. Yeltsin’s daughter Tatiana, played by Petra Lorenc, is great friends with Berezovsky, but she comes across as submissive. When Berezovsky dismisses her choices for the future President of Russia once Yeltsin resigns, she immediately cedes her chosen candidates merely because Berezovsky objects.
The female TV announcer who accepts the task of reading the anti-Putin announcement where Berezovsky blames Putin for the Kursk submarine accident – his first move of open hostility against the new Russian President – gradually sinks to the floor as she is reading, knowing her life is over; she is the victim of male coercion. Even Litvinenko’s wife Marina, played by Anna Čonková, is an adjunct to her husband. Despite her husband being extremely ill, she doesn’t call emergency medical services because her spouse forbade her to do so. He was suffering from radiation poisoning, so it is unlikely that earlier treatment would have saved his life, but her obedience reveals a lack of independence that seems to be characteristic of women in normative societies, as much in the west as in Russia, in the last century.
Berezovsky has one friend whom he loves, Alexander Litvinenko. He is played by Tomáš David as a counterbalance to Boris in his reasoned, rational attitudes but they share a similar idealistic naivety. The FSB asks him to kill Boris Berezovsky, but he refuses, saying that now (1998) in this budding democracy that Russia seems to be, the secret service of the country should be pure and honest. This is why, in the play, Putin has him imprisoned and tortured until he is released and exiled due to Boris’s insistence. The facts are somewhat different: he was persecuted by Putin’s henchmen and fled to the United Kingdom. In London, he remained a public critic of Putin and died (in 2006) a victim of the long arm of Russian agents who poison him with polonium for supposedly being a traitor. The lines addressed to Putin that Litvinenko himself wrote from his deathbed are quoted in the play: “You have shown yourself to have no respect for life, liberty or any civilized value.”
Litvinenko resurfaces as a ghost who talks to and advises a discouraged and depressed Boris but to no avail. The crime they both committed, portrayed on stage, of publicly revealing that the supposed Chechen attack in Moscow was a false flag for Putin to justify invading Chechnya was too great an insult to the mammoth secret operational style of Putin to ever be forgiven.
And even in the UK, Berezovsky is betrayed. The trial between Roman Abramovich, played as starstruck though eventually Putin-serving by Pavel Čeněk Vaculík, and Boris Berezovsky where the British judge passes a verdict that supports Abramovich and hence Putin, is enacted on stage in a scene that oversimplifies and has us cheering our hero, Berezovsky, and deriding the British legal system.
Vít Kořínek, the dramaturge for this National Theater Brno production, wrote several essays in the programme that complement the stage show. These essays reveal why the theatre chose to stage Patriots. For those in the Czech Republic, Russian aggression is a matter of deadly seriousness. Kořínek explained that “Russian liberals and freedom fighters differ from the Westerners in that they seek freedom and democracy for Russia but not for the surrounding states.” He goes on to explain that Litvinenko would have murdered a Ukrainian or a Georgian if asked by the state secret services to do so, but he refused to assassinate Berezovsky because he was a Russian.
