Peter Morgan, who struck gold with The Crown on Netflix and The Audience on Broadway—the series  and the play about the 20th-century British monarchy, specifically Queen Elizabeth II—returns with Patriots, a vivid retelling of how the unknown deputy mayor of St. Petersburg, Vladimir Putin, outmaneuvered the rich oligarchs who thought him a mere puppet all the way to the highest reaches of the Kremlin.

Patriots homes in on one oligarch in particular: Boris Berezovsky, one of Russia’s richest and most powerful men, who took over the state television network during the country's post-Communist chaos. Berezovsky helps pull the strings to make sure that Boris Yeltsin is re-elected president, and—after Yeltsin resigns on New Year’s Day, 1999—with the other oligarchs decides they need a true nobody they can install as the country’s leader so they can remain behind-the-scenes puppet masters. How little they knew.

 

Morgan’s slickly entertaining cautionary tale begins in 1955, when Berezovsky’s mother is notified by the authorities that her nine-year-old son is a precocious math whiz; she takes him to a famous professor to tutor the boy, who goes on to make his mark in applied mathematics. But even though his goal is to win a Nobel prize, when Communism collapses, Berezovsky decides that he’d rather apply his genius to helping his country—which is where he knows the money is. He amasses great wealth and power, finding it contagious. It’s also dangerous—he nearly dies in an assassination attempt (the car bomb kills his driver), and he hires an officer from the police unit investigating the explosion to take over his security detail, which works out well. For a while, at least.

 

Of course, since the ultimate outcome is well-known for both Berezovsky and Putin (Putin fares much better), there’s little suspense. But Morgan’s shrewd writing and Rupert Goold’s spectacular staging keep it all percolating: like J.T. Rogers’ Corruption, Patriots illuminates the recent past through the lens of our complicated present. As Bartlett Sher did with Corruption, Goold merges the dazzling visual and aural trappings—Miriam Buether’s sets, Jack Knowles’ lighting, Buether and Deborah Andrews’ costumes, Ash J Woodward’s projections, Polly Bennett’s movement and Adam Cork’s sound design and music—to dynamically display the complexity and confusion of the oligarchs and their often wrongheaded decisions.

 

The large supporting cast is on-target playing an array of characters, while Will Keen’s Putin is simultaneously funny and horrifying even when approaching caricature. At the center of Patriots is Michael Stuhlbarg, who as Berezovsky gives an excitingly reckless performance that occasionally goes overboard; yet it’s in keeping with this outsized story that makes for a genuinely gripping cautionary tale.