Peter Morgan’s new work follows Vladimir Putin’s rise to the presidency and the Russian high-fliers who mistakenly thought he’d be their puppet.
, Morgan was keen to move on. He had an idea for a play about the oligarchs who, in the 1990s, helped propel an obscure Putin to power and then had to watch as their Frankenstein changed the course of Russian history in a disastrous way.
Morgan says he loves “riveting personal interactions” with a backdrop of history, when you see the impetus for an event and realise “it’s because of envy, or it’s because of persecution, or it’s because of jealousy, or because of love”. “If there was a rock star of that era,” Morgan says, “if there was an iconic character who most typified the indulgence, the excess, in a sense the lawlessness of oligarchy, it would be him. I was interested in somebody that everybody felt was magnetic.”
Once Putin got to the top and clamped down on the oligarchs, Berezovsky, stripped of power, became “a reluctant revolutionary”., who worked for the federal security service and investigated the bombing of Berezovsky’s car in 1994, which left his chauffeur decapitated. “I think you put anyone onstage, and you cannot help but humanise them,” says director Rupert Goold. “That’s true of Macbeth.”Berezovsky shepherds the mild-mannered young politician’s career, pulling him into Yeltsin’s inner circle – “letting a form of the devil into his orbit”, as Goold puts it.
“The culture in the house that I grew up in was: you can lose anything overnight,” he says. “It was a very, very Jewish culture that I grew up in, but also people who’d lost everything. Immigrants who come to a country with nothing. Both of my parents came to the UK with a paper bag.”“A lot of the first generation of oligarchs were Jewish,” Morgan says. “Interestingly, Putin has a very positive relationship with Jews. There’s nothing antisemitic about Putin, I don’t think.
He asks Khrushcheva where she stands on the matter. “I am one of those people who think that you can expect everything and anything from the KGB,” she says, adding she wouldn’t put anything past Putin “ever”.
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