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As both men repeatedly bungle the operation, it becomes clear that two villages somewhere in Siberia have lost their idiots. Having read Mr Harding's later book Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West this follows a similar theme with pacey writing whilst retaining believability based on the official documents, open sources and interviews he conducted. What they do is what I call the philosphy of "Kill Your Ghandis." Then you don't have to deal with them anymore. Never tolerate any criticism. Accept only total allegiance. Sound familiar? That's Trump without the killing. Some of that tone, and the comic, expressive way she articulates it, will be familiar to audiences of Prebble’s breakthrough play, Enron, which skewered the hubris and banality of boardroom greed, while also offering a nuanced song-and-dance primer on the forces that collapsed the world’s economy. A Very Expensive Poison” showcases investigative journalism at its best. So good were Harding’s investigative skills, that it prompted break-ins to his Moscow-based apartment – an eerie and grippingly paranoid part of the book. You can’t help but start looking at your food, drinks, phone reception in different ways while reading this!
Gupta has moved the action to the Calcutta of 1879, the date the play was written. Every part is recalibrated. Crucially, Nora becomes Niru, a young Bengali woman; her husband, Tom Helmer, is a colonial administrator. Niru shimmers in saris; Helmer (Elliot Cowan) is buttoned into a three-piece suit: he calls his wife his little skylark. When he bends over her is he protecting or entrapping her in the cage of his body? Those sanctions that the world has placed on Russia are woefully inadequate half-measures, but there have been calls for even those sanctions to be reversed, most recently by Italy’s newly elected populist government. Putin has cultivated many friends among Europe’s far-right and far-left parties, and the recent success of these parties across Europe has no doubt brought some warmth to his icy heart. I thought quite hard about whether or not to include him,” she says. “Not out of fear or anything, but because the mythologising is something he clearly enjoys.” Prebble suggests she emerged from the team experience of writing the first series “almost as if I had been rebuilt”. Season two of Succession airs on 12 August; she has just finished work on the final episode.Once con man leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle. My favourite scene in Prebble’s hugely enjoyable production comes when two British representatives – a detective and a lawyer – come to arrest Litvinenko’s killers. What happens next is a piece of messy meta-genius. We see a trail of luminous polonium handprints, a dance routine in which the murderers flee, shuffling off stage right, and a poignant last waltz. She is not completely sure why. It would be too easy, she insists, to say that the Americans didn’t want a clever young British woman exposing and ridiculing the corruption of Wall Street. “ Hamilton is the perfect American show,” she says. “The struggle and the optimism and the triumph. It’s brilliant. But I have a bleaker sensibility. For some people my plays can feel like being hit over the head with information all the time.” Litvinenko's story is of course central but he was far from being a lone victim of state sponsored murder. The methods varied, some more imaginative than others. These two men left a radioactive trail around London, as they made various bungled attempts to kill the man who considered them as, if not friends, acquaintances. His need to make a living in his new country made Alexander Litvinenko careless. If the authorities had considered his fears of being killed more seriously, possibly he would not have been in the position where he was forced to let his guard down. We must also consider the two men who the author says carried out the poisoning; Andrei Lugovoi and Dimitry Kovtun, who are accused in this book of not only killing a man, but who glibly poured this extremely dangerous substance down various hotel sinks and could possibly have caused a major health disaster (at one point, one of the men even told his young son to shake Litvinenko’s hand, aware that he had just touched the poison).
For more information about Lucy Prebble's first new play in seven years, read our blog on the Top 7 Facts You Should Know About A Very Expensive Poison at The Old Vic. The true story of Alexander Litvinenko The book seems to me hastily written. At times, the reader of A Very Expensive Poison is left to wonder whom the author is quoting and, more importantly, why he is quoting them. Key scenes make no sense. A week before the poisoning, the two suspected murderers, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitry Kovtun, first tried to get Litvinenko to ingest the poison. This is how Harding describes it: Luke Harding served as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and ran into enough trouble there to provide material for his 2011 book, The Mafia State. He has also published works on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and American whistleblower Edward Snowden. Given his knowledge of Russia and his experience of writing about the underbelly of secret services, the Litvinenko story might seem perfect for him. The book was published in 2016 and can be read as a commentary on current affairs – Georgia, Ukraine, Syria, NATO, Europe, USA.The play offers a compelling portrait of Russian corruption and British vacillation – it took nearly a decade for a public inquiry to be launched – and its multifaceted approach is anchored by strong central performances. MyAnna Buring’s Marina emerges as a woman of implacable determination and ferocious loyalty who shares her husband’s obsession with truth. Tom Brooke captures the complexity of Litvinenko, whose moral zeal is accompanied by a desire to protect his family. There is also a gallery of fine supporting performances from Reece Shearsmith as the deviously dangerous Putin, Lloyd Hutchinson and Michael Shaeffer as the barely competent assassins, Peter Polycarpou as the glad-handing Bereszovsky and Thomas Arnold as Marina’s staunch legal ally. It’s an evening that instructs as it entertains and that leaves one appalled at Britain’s initial reluctance to do anything that might antagonise Moscow. Litvenenko’s assassination did not occur in a vacuum. There is a description of the Crimea takeover which gives insight as to how the Putin regime works. There is a description of the wealth these oligarchs are protecting, not only in their world-wide properties but also their prominence in the Panama Papers. (For those following Putin and his circle it is interesting that “cellist” features in the “Papers”.) Prebble was initially approached to work on it by her American agent. “They said ‘do you want to be a writer in the room?’” she recalls – no longer the lead. “So I went in at a little bit of a low ebb – but it was just the most life-changing, brilliant environment. That self-protective thing that can be common in theatre – ‘don’t mess with my words!’ – wasn’t there. All these brilliant comic writers would say, ‘I’ve written this but it’s a bit shit, can you help?’ I’d never had that before but it was like coming home.” High-stakes politics and radioactive villainy combine in a time of global crises. Set to the looming threat of a new Cold War, A Very Expensive Poison sends you careering through the murky world of international espionage – everpresent, everywhere from Moscow to Mayfair.
She found it harder and harder to write. She did a pilot for an HBO series starring Sarah Silverman, “someone I really admire and love”. HBO dropped it. “Everyone was looking to me to be the American idea of the showrunner,” she says, “and I was at my least confident at that point.” Extraordinarily pacy…one of the best political thrillers I have come across in years.”– The Evening Standard On a whirlwind journey from Moscow to Mayfair, it follows Litvinenko as he investigates his own death, and his wife Marina’s quest for justice, in the face of Russian corruption and British vacillation. Importance, for Prebble, is about portents. She was sent Harding’s book to read at the beginning of 2017. The Salisbury poisonings hadn’t happened yet, but Trump had just come to power. Her excitement about writing the play boiled down to the sense that “there was something in the present that I felt was explained by this story”.The second thing that helped to restore her confidence was the HBO series Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s compulsive dynastic drama, which chronicles the comic machinations of a billionaire media family (with echoes of the Murdochs and the Redstones) evolved into a box-set King Lear. This book reads like the best spy novel you’ve ever read. Or perhaps even the most gripping Bourne film you’ve watched – but it’s a true story. A terrifying, edge-of-your-seat true story.
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