Oh, what a circus

The idea of misused patriotism is the theme of an intelligent play that features Putin’s rise to power and Giffords is still the best circus in town

- Michael Billington

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.