“Patriots” offers up a potted history of Russia from the 1990s, the era of bumbling Boris Yeltsin, to the present.
As fans of “The Crown” know well, the British writer Peter Morgan is singularly adept at explaining how the most basic human emotions — pride, pique, greed, sexual need, raging insecurity — impact magnitudinous global events. In “Patriots,” Morgan’s newest Broadway play, he turns his attention to the Kremlin and the rise, with no fall yet in sight, of the obscure deputy mayor turned one of the world’s most ruthless despots: Vladimir Putin.
The answer there, Morgan suggests, is inextricably linked to the rise of Russian oligarchs, the hyper-wealthy Russians who seized on the fall of communism for their own epic material gain, snapping up former state assets like utilities and television stations and spending the windfalls on megayachts, cruising the Mediterranean with impunity.
Stuhlbarg is a loquacious, slightly goofy actor and that fits Morgan’s conception of the character like a fur-lined glove as he leans away from his professorial mentor as the thrill of money and power takes over his body and soul. In this play, this smart man comes off as making one of the great misjudgments of the modern political era and Morgan clearly was fascinated by the how and the why.
“Patriots” has the sweep of a Shakespearean history play and many of the same points of conflict. But Goold, long fond of a certain trashy beauty in the theater, leavens those tendencies and adds Broadway pizzazz.
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