IT'S astonishing how often plays that have been chosen for staging unexpectedly open at a time when their nature reflects what is happening in the country and communities where they are being presented.
Three plays that opened in London in September last year, for instance, were noted by a New York Times reviewer to be "Political Plays for Political Times". One of the plays, A Very Expensive Poison, was based on the true story of the assassination in Britain in 2006 by a pair of Russian hitmen of Alexander Litvinenko, a former inspector with Russia's Federal Security Service, an organisation whose tasks included counter-espionage.
Litvinenko had fled in 2000 with his wife, Marina, from Russia to London so that they and their children could have a more comfortable life, with the pair given British citizenship.
When Vladimir Putin, a Russian politician and former intelligence officer, became Russia's president at the end of 1999 he took direct control of the Federal Security Service from May, 2000, and was determined to punish Litvinenko for damaging Russia's relationships with other countries. On November 1, 2006, Litvinenko fell ill. Earlier that day, he had met with two Russian agents, Dmitry Kovtun and Andrei Lugovoy, and, as part of their get-together, they conversed over an afternoon tea. On November 3, Litvinenko was admitted to Barnet General Hospital in London. He was then moved to another hospital for intensive care. His illness was later attributed to poisoning with radionuclide polonium-210 after the Health Protection Agency found significant amounts of the rare and highly toxic element in his body. Litvinenko, who was aged 43, died on November 23. As the tea water was a green colour, the investigating officials saw that as the reason for his death.
A Very Expensive Poison had good reviews and attracted many audience members because Lucy Prebble's stage adaptation and the director, John Crowley, and the actors put a lot of dark humour into the play. One reviewer, Matt Wolf, noted that the play put Vladimir Putin on stage, with the actor-comedian playing him, Reece Shearsmith, making him appear as "a virus that cannot be contained". He cropped up at various points within the auditorium - in a box one minute, on the orchestra level the next. Wolf likewise praised Lucy Prebble's "ambitious, shape-shifting play" for moving on from a fairly expository first half to become a satirical vaudeville, more chilling than funny, in the second half.
Another reviewer, Michael Billington, liked the way she had allowed Litvinenko's former boss, Vladimir Putin, to become the "unreliable narrator" while showing how two Kremlin hitmen were despatched to London to carry out the killing.
He noted that "In part, it is the love story of the Litvinenkos, capturing their closeness, Marina's occasional criticism of her husband's dubious anti-Putin tactics in exile and her determination that the truth about his death should be told despite the evasiveness of the British government when Theresa May was home secretary. But Prebble is unafraid to show the black comedy behind a tragic story. The hitmen turn out to be hapless bumblers, one of them even mislaying the fountain pen that contains the poison. Even Putin, who seeks to control the narrative from the vantage point of a stage-box, becomes a smarmy puppetmaster concealing his menace under a mask of ingratiation. He also pointed out that it was "the theatricality of the piece that constantly surprises: the history of polonium is told through a shadow-play fairytale and the Russian entrepreneur Boris Bereszovsky bursts into song while dining in a swanky Mayfair restaurant". He summed up by saying: "The play offers a compelling portrait of Russian corruption and British vacillation - it took nearly a decade for a public inquiry to be launched" into what caused Litvinenko's death.
Marina Litvinenko was invited to attend the London premiere of the play at the beginning of September last year and accepted the invitation, aware that she would have to watch her husband die again. She said she had felt nervous going to the theatre, because she didn't know what to expect. There had been several documentaries about her husband's murder, but never a play. The only previous dramatisation was screened on Russian state television, she said, and, in it, Mr Litvinenko was poisoned by another critic of the Kremlin.
Ms Litvinenko said she had also been nervous for another reason. "I want these people, this play, to succeed," she said. "I want people to understand its message." After the murder, Ms Litvinenko fought for years for an inquest, then a public inquiry, into her husband's death, despite successive British governments blocking her efforts. She was as driven in her fight to expose Russian wrongdoing as her husband had been.
The playwright, Lucy Prebble, had also decided to tell the complex story of Mr. Litvinenko's life and murder by having the character investigate his own death, with Mr Putin trying to direct the action, or at least divert the audience's attention from the truth, from the sidelines. Ms Litvinenko sees the play as a kind of a justice: "People who come will understand who committed this crime. You can't just do what Putin tries, to turn a page and forget it. He decides it's all forgotten. But not for me. Not for my friends. And now not for many people who watch this play."
