The scenography is superb (although at the Noel Coward theatre Miriam Buether’s crimson, cruciform set is probably best enjoyed from the circle where you can actually see its form, which you do not really get in the stalls), the acting really quite enthralling, but the play itself – mediocre to say the least.

Watching it, I assumed it must have been written no later than 2015. I was very much surprised to learn, coming back home after the performance, that the play only premiered in 2022. Why? Because it is a play that explores the post-Soviet era, charting the rise of Russian oligarchy in 1991 to Putin’s rise to power, without a ‘so what.’ It highlights how the West remained deaf to Berezovsky’s warnings about Putin, but draws no explicit parallel to why we have to hold steadfast now and what the obvious consequences will be if Ukraine is defeated.

Theatre does not have to be explicit, I hear you say. And I agree. But it needs to be something. And the problem I have with this play, is that it is nothing. The author did not seem to have the courage to lay bare his interpretation of the characters’ motivations. These events are very recent history – looking by the demographics of the audience – very much in everyone’s living memory. To be gripping, we need the playwright to give us a bit more food for thought. Why did Berezovsky choose the one politician he could not bribe to be his patsy? Why did the Oligarchs fall in line? Did Putin transform from meek to martinet? Instead, what we get is a sometimes more and sometimes less enjoyable recounting of what most of us can remember from Sky News that tries to pack in too much detail and not enough thought.

The first part is fast paced – the scene with Berezovsky taking multiple phone calls filled with cutting dialogue, quips and jokes – does create a sense of what it might have been like back then. It does not quite feel like a play thought; it feels more like watching television – with scenes chopping and changing, characters not really developed – it rushes before your eyes like an accelerated lesson in history – but history limited to facts and dates, not history attempting to explore the why.

So then part two tries to make up for this. It becomes more theatrical, with lots of staring into the distance and two people on stage exchanging monologues. The tag line describes this as ‘a fight for Russia’s soul;’ by the end it felt like a losing fight for my attention. There were at least three monologues that I thought would be the final ones but unfortunately weren’t. For the last thirty minutes I was waiting for the fat lady to sing. No wonder it took the audience a good couple of seconds to start clapping when the show finally ended – they were all expecting yet another ending to begin. And in all this pathos-filled talking, including from the ghost of Litvinenko, the moral of the story seems to get lost; or maybe it was never there in the first place.