PATRIOTISM, as Dr Johnson famously said, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. Peter Morgan pushes that idea to its limits in his grippingly intelligent play, Patriots, which opened last year at the Almeida and which has now transferred to the Noël Coward Theatre. If anything, the play has gained even greater resonance with time: when we hear Vladimir Putin denounced as ‘a nationalistic dictator interested in rebuilding a Russian superstate’, we feel a chill of recognition.
The words are spoken by the billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose rise and fall lies at the heart of the play. A mathematical genius in his youth, Berezovsky uses his financial acumen to make a massive fortune and buy political influence in the post-Soviet Russia of the 1990s. He not only controls Boris Yeltsin, he instals in the Kremlin a little-known ex-deputy-mayor of St Petersburg, Putin, whom he sees as a useful puppet. ‘We just need a nice grey executioner of our wishes,’ he tells Yeltsin’s daughter, who sharply replies that the word is ‘executor’.
This leads to a scene at the start of the second act that Shakespeare or Schiller would have understood, as it is about the shifting dynamics of power. It is now 2000, Putin has become president and Berezovsky marches into the Kremlin outraged at the idea that he and his fellow oligarchs should be seen as subordinate to politicians. I was reminded strongly of the moment in Richard III when the kingmaker, Buckingham, comes to claim his due and is brusquely rejected. Not unlike Buckingham, Berezovsky ends up in exile, but the playwright’s point is that both he and Putin see themselves as patriots: Berezovsky seeks to save his beloved Russia through buccaneering capitalism, Putin through a reclamation of lost territory and global power.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 21, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة June 21, 2023 من Country Life UK.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
