in Patriots. Photograph: Marc Brenner
Rupert Goold’s vivid production of Patriots has earned its larger space. Time has amplified the impact of Peter Morgan’s play about who runs Russia. At the Almeida last year, this portrait of the power of the oligarch Boris Berezovsky and his one-time protege Vladimir Putin opened with painful resonance. The invasion of Ukraine was recent; the UK had its own Boris – and was beginning to think about the effects of “charismatic” leadership. With destruction entrenched, the play has a still longer reach; it is a particularly good time to chart how anyone comes to power.
Miriam Buether’s design – black and scarlet, stretching out wide with different levels – is like a Soviet coffer, and something infernal. It suggests huge distances but also restriction. Dynamically projecting the sucking vacuum left by the fall of communism, Morgan pithily suggests that Russia has been in the charge of men so used to controlling an empire that they had difficulty in thinking of themselves as belonging simply to a country.
