Last Friday, Litvinenko went to London’s Old Vic Theater to watch “A Very Expensive Poison,” a new play by Lucy Prebble, running through Oct. 5. She knew she would have to watch her husband die again.
In a telephone interview the morning after the performance, Litvinenko recalled how, as she sat in the theater beforehand, a woman walked up to her, shook her hand and said, “I think you’re very brave.”
“I didn’t know for which reason,” Litvinenko said — “for coming and watching the play, or fighting for Sasha.”
Litvinenko said she had felt nervous going to the theater, partly because she didn’t know what to expect. There had been several documentaries about her husband’s murder, but never a play. The only previous dramatization was screened on Russian state television, she said. In it, Litvinenko was poisoned by another critic of the Kremlin.
Litvinenko said she had been nervous for another reason, too. “I want these people, this play, to succeed,” she said. “I want people to understand its message.”
Two weeks before Litvinenko went to see the play, Prebble, the playwright, sat in an office at the Old Vic Theater and pulled a bemused face at two glasses of water that had been left for her on a table. “It’s difficult to not be a little bit paranoid now,” she said. “I feel a little bit like I shouldn’t drink something that’s already been poured for me.”
It has been a decade since Prebble became the talk of British theater with “Enron,” a play that told the story of the U.S. energy company’s implosion, and that featured song and dance numbers and even, at one point, dinosaurs. “Enron” was a hit in the West End, but closed on Broadway after just one week.
The idea for “A Very Expensive Poison” came to her by surprise in 2017, Prebble said. Lately, she has been writing mostly for television (notably the HBO family drama “Succession”), and she felt she might be through with theater, she said. But then the Old Vic sent her a copy of a book about the Litvinenko case.
Prebble said she was only a short way through it when she felt she had to write a play about it. And she knew instantly how to do it.
She decided to tell the complex story of Litvinenko’s life and murder by having the character investigate his own death, with Putin trying to direct the action, or at least divert the audience’s attention from the truth, from the sidelines.
Prebble said she was also drawn to the love story behind the news event.
“I was touched by the immense loss to Marina,” she said. “She was not just dealing with a bereavement, which is terrible enough already, she was dealing with it being a murder, and then she’s dealing with the political machinations of it.”
After the murder, Litvinenko fought for years for an inquest, then a public inquiry, into her husband’s death, despite successive British governments blocking her efforts. She was as driven in her fight to expose Russian wrongdoing as her husband had been, Prebble said. “I thought what Marina did was tremendously moving,” she said. “She sort of carried on his fight.”
The writer met Litvinenko several times while researching the play, she said. The first was in a basement cafe of the London bookshop where Litvinenko used to meet his handler from the British secret service. Prebble worried that she might lose her sense of professional distance, she said, but that doesn’t seem to have happened: In the play, Litvinenko is sometimes portrayed as overly proud, or dangerously obsessed.
The play, Prebble said, has several messages: about Russian politics, about how governments in the West overlook murders like Litvinenko’s for economic or political reasons, and about male pride. But the main one, she said, is that a family suffered, and that no matter how absurd these events seem, they’re personal.
“After I met Marina a number of times, I did feel a personal connection to her,” Prebble said. “I wanted to do justice to how she spoke about Sasha.”
Last Friday at the Old Vic, Litvinenko eventually sat down to watch her life with Alexander onstage — both the happy times and the tragic ones.
Litvinenko said she was amazed by actor MyAnna Buring’s portrayal of her. “MyAnna took everything from me: how she moved, how she talked, how she looked,” she said.
She was equally impressed by Reece Shearsmith’s portrayal of Putin, she said. His interjections during the play should make people realize how Russia’s president really works, she added: by holding up a pretense of a democracy, although information and the courts are controlled and opposition is stifled.
“I saw people’s reactions, and I think they were understanding what’s happening in Russia now,” Litvinenko said.
She cried several times, but said there was one moment that had a bigger effect on her than any other. It was a short scene — just a few seconds long, and toward the end — in which Buring and Tom Brooke, the actor playing Litvinenko, dance tentatively.
“It was the breaking point for me,” said Litvinenko, a former dance teacher. “Of course, Sasha couldn’t dance,” she added. “We did try some movements, but it was only like this: just three simple steps, nothing difficult.”
Her voice broke as she spoke, as if she were about to cry again.
“It’s kind of a justice for me,” she said of the play. “People who come will understand who committed this crime. You can’t just do what Putin tries, to turn a page and forget it.”
“He decides it’s all forgotten,” Litvinenko added. “But not for me. Not for my friends. And now not for many people who watch this play.”
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‘A Very Expensive Poison’
Through Oct. 5 at the Old Vic, London; oldvictheater.com.
This article originally appeared in
.