Patriots – Almeida / Noel Coward Theatre

This sounds awesome! I hope I can score tickets when they go onsale.

phew. glad I am a member. looks like seating is scarce for the dates I was looking at. got great seats.

Usual 'restricted' view seats for £10. That'll do.

In case anyone needs to plan trains etc, I went tonight and the sign said running time 2hrs 50mins but it was 10.30 when we came out.

It felt rather like an enjoyable Russian history lesson but I couldn't necessarily see its purpose as a play. I also need to do some googling to figure out how accurate the history lesson was!!

Oh also we had booked B27 and B28 stalls (restricted view) and when we arrived they said those seats had been removed and we were upgraded to central stalls, unrestricted view, so if you've booked those seats you may get a sneeky upgrade!

Saw this tonight and thought it was excellent. Am a sucker for a political play (of everything I’ve seen post pandemic the only new play that tops this for me is Best of Enemies, so you can see my leanings) and I thought this was well written and staged. Cast are generally very good and the nearly three hours (ran to about 2:50 tonight) flew by.

I opted out of seeing this after these initial first takes on the board.

Will be interesting to see if it gets a transfer given the run is nearly sold out.

Just noticed that Sonia Friedman is involved with Patriots, that suggests that if it does have a further life, she'll be one of the commercial producers.

I enjoyed this enormously. Brilliant performances, witty dialogue, a vivid recent history play with relevance for today. This is an interesting perspective from a friend of Berezovsky's.

www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/15/patriots-peter-morgan-play-boris-berezovsky-russian-view

Went to this yesterday and very much enjoyed it. As someone who used to work in Russia, it does a good job at distilling a specific moment in time. It does slightly look clarity as it goes along but brilliantly acted. Will Keen as Putin does steal the show.

According to an article in The Stage, the first two shows will be produced in-house, and the third will be with an outside company.

Peter Morgan's play ponders whether those vying for power in 90s Russia following Perestroika were idealistic patriots or greedy opportunists, or the former corrupted into the latter by circumstance and realpolitik. It leaves the question open.

In the hands of, say, Mike Bartlett, such rich material would have lent itself to an epic Shakespearean tragedy, but Morgan's treatment squanders the opportunity, and the writing feels more akin to the style of the soap operas that masquerade as prime-time tv historical drama serials these days. This is not helped by excessive expositional dialogue shoe-horned in. There are also some cringemakingly-awful attempts to extract allegories from simple mathematical concepts a la Tom Stoppard.

I had forgotten that one of my reasons for booking Patriots was the presence of Tom Hollander as Boris Berezovsky. So, from my side-circle, front-row, vantage point last night, looking down on the lead's artificially balding crown, it took me a few minutes to place the familiar voice, so different was his appearance.

Any character who could believably have risen to command power and wealth in the former Soviet Union is always going to be a larger-than-life one, and Hollander delivers that, yet keeps Berezovsky human and avoids pathos or turning him into a pantomime villain. It is a bravura performance.

Both Will Keen as Mad Vlad Putin and Luke Thallon as Abramovich are exceptional, their body language being unnervingly accurate. (Interestingly, the production chooses to pronounce the former-Chelsea-owning oligarch's surname with the accent on the second syllable as practised by football pundits, rather than the third as we've been told is more accurate.)

For such a tiny theatre as the Almeida, the set design is unnecessarily and wastefully large. The sides are invisible from the Circle so rarely used, and the front did not need to protrude so far as to knock out several rows of Stalls seating.

This is a production that will be talked about for years and is very much worth seeing, but it falls well short of its potential. The fault lies with the playwright.

Three stars.

Act 1: 19:34-20:41
Act 2: 21:02-22:13

I was totally absorbed by this - unlike The Lehman Trilogy which I hated. Fantastic performances and stylish design and for me a return to form for The Almeida whose previous recent offerings have left me cold.