Peter Morgan describes his plays as an “odd collection of pas de deux—dances between very different kinds of people.” His newest eloquent exercise in warring dualities is Patriots, where the oligarch Boris Berezovsky goes toe-to-toe with Vladimir Putin, his puppet turned persecutor. The play follows Berezovsky’s extraordinary and volatile career—from nine-year-old math whiz to his British exile and disputed suicide, in 2013. Berezovsky sees himself as an entrepreneurial hero of the New Russia, a sort of capitalist Lone Ranger, whose silver bullet is the creation of wealth and opportunity for the ossified Russian economy, which had privatized state assets in 1990 and turned him into a kingpin. As staged, Berezovsky is some kind of octopus of activity. “He seems to be doing five things at once,” the stage directions read. (His tentacles of influence reach frenetically in all directions.) He’s on the phone to his daughter when his assistant interrupts to tell him the deputy mayor of St. Petersburg is on the line. “Remind me? Name?,” Berezovsky says to his assistant, who checks his notes. “Putin. Vladimir.” And Fortune’s wheel takes another turn.
—John Lahr