10
The Observer
04.08.19 Cover storyvideo games and books rather than
plays or fi lms. When she was taken
along to theatre as a girl – she
grew up in Haslemere in Surrey ,
the youngest daughter of an IT
consultancy director – she says she
always felt a bit embarrassed for
the performers, asking us to make
believe. But at a time when real life
has become harder to trust she has
grown to understand the power –
and dramatic irony – of having real
people sit in a darkened room and
collectively suspend disbelief.
The Litvinenko case, in which
such shadowy fi gures as Boris
Berez ovsky and Vladimir Putin
become rival puppeteers, was
a perfect vehicle to expose the
distortions of the truth. Even so,
the more Prebble read about it,
the more that cerebral scaffolding
contrasted with the human tragedy
at the heart of it. Much of her
drama is focused on the emergency
room of Barnet and Chase Farm
hospital in north London, where
Marina and Alexander (Sasha)
Litvinenko found themselves
trying to explain to British police
detectives what might have
happened.P
rebble met Marina
Litvinenko many times
to discuss the story
with her. The fi rst
time – after she had
been introduced by
Harding – was with trepidation:
“partly because I didn’t want to feel
sort of beholden to her as a writer,”
she says. “But also because she had
been through this terrible tragedy,
and obviously I didn’t want to
misrepresent the truth emotionally.”
Prebble need not have worried.
Marina Litvinenko proved not only
an enthusiast for the project “but
really playful, very twinkly, quite
dry”. Prebble told her how a stage
play – particularly her stage play- would be different from a book,
in that it would be going feet fi rst
into emotional areas. Litvinenko
understood that. “She told me two
things that I valued hugely,” Prebble
says. “The fi rst was: please don’t
forget the cost to our lives of what
happened. And the second thing
was: please don’t forget that this is a
love story.”
The day after I interviewed
Prebble last week, I spoke to Marina
Litvinenko on the phone about
the play. She explained how at the
beginning of the rehearsal process
she had been in to meet the cast
and give as much detail about the
people as she could. “Not only about
my character and Sasha’s character,
but about the meetings in Russia
and the politics.” She liked how
enthusiastic the cast were “to try to
understand more and more about
what happened” – refl ecting her
own personal mission for the past
13 years.
Litvinenko has long got used to
the surreal, but it was a different
level of strangeness to be briefi ng
actors pretending to be her and her
late husband. She squared this with
observation that “In times of
universal deceit, telling the truth is
a revolutionary act”. Marina
Litvinenko continues courageously
to pursue the extradition of her
husband’s alleged murderers, but
she is sanguine about the likelihood
of success. “Even if they are brought
to justice in 20 years or 30 ,” she
says, “I am still satisfi ed that they
are being punished every day that
they wake up and know that they are
murderers.”
Does she think that Prebble’s
play can advance her demands
for justice?
She says that the current Russian
regime is “without shame”, though
she believes the current protests in
Moscow indicate that change will
come. She worries more, she says,
about “how many times the British
government are going to make
the same mistakes. In 2000 when
Blair believed he was in a good
relationship with Putin it fi nished in
a bad one in 2006. David Cameron
thought he could build a new
relationship and it didn’t happen.
Let us see what happens with the
new prime minster...”
We both laugh.
“Actually,” she says, “I would like
Boris Johnson to watch this play.
That would be a good start for him.”
Prebble says that a primary
concern in the writing was to bring
the intimacy of the Litvinenko s’
marriage to the stage. They bicker
and banter affectionately in the
hospital as they try to get the
story straight.
The mystifi ed medical and police
response in the play is a reminder
of how hard it was to fi nd a context
for the poisoning at the time. “If
we had placed Putin at all in 2006,”Not taking part
is not good for
you. We are
all a bit
responsible for
the society we
have created
Continued from page 9Prebble says, “it was as someone we
could probably do business with.
Obviously now looking back, the
poisoning seems like an experiment
in pushing boundaries. If the Blair
government and the Cameron
government had reacted more
strongly, then perhaps we would not
be where we are.”
Harding agrees. But even when
he wrote his book in 2016 he was
convinced that the Kremlin “would
never order this kind of thing
again, because the fallout was so
disastrous ”. But then the Skripal
poisoning happened in Salisbury,
almost a copycat crime.
Does he believe they did so to
prove that they could do so?
“I think Skripal was a huge
V-sign to the British establishment,”
Harding says. “It said: you are weak,
a declining power in the world;
you will be friendless after Brexit
and we can do this kind of thing
on your territory any time we like.
And what’s more we can joke about
it afterwards.”
One of the things that
concentrated Prebble’s mind
in shaping the tone of her play
was those disturbing Russian TV
interviews with the perpetrators of
the Salisbury attack, speaking about
their interest in visiting the city to
view the cathedral’s famous spire.
“It is the satire that Putin has always
used,” she says. “This idea of you
know I’m lying, but we are bonded
together in this smirking joke.”
We talk about how that principle
has been exported – with examples
that include Donald Trump’s more
bizarre Twitter delusions to Boris
Johnson’s fantasies about making
buses out of wine crates. The thread
is that the joke is on those whowould seek conventional truth; the
punchline is that truth does not
matter, when you have power.
Prebble’s play seeks to undermine
that relationship. She puts Putin
centre stage, initially as a kind of
David Brent fi gure. “He is shorter
than you think,” reads her fi rst stage
direction about the president.
“I thought quite hard about
whether or not to include him,” she
says. “Not out of fear or anything,
but because the mythologising is
something he clearly enjoys.”
We live in a world, I say ,
increasingly dominated by
authoritarian men whose greatest
fears are being laughed at
or ignored.
“What the play is about in some
sense,” she says, “is how we manage
male humiliation. All women know
the dangers of being around a man
who has been humiliated – it is
an emotion that can shift quickly
into anger and aggression. If that
happens en masse, whether it is
Russia after the cold war, or parts
of Britain or the midwest after the
collapse of manufacturing, it creates
great potential for anger, and for the
political forces that can exploit that.”I
last spoke to Prebble about
some of those issues in an
interview a decade ago,
when her play Enron was
in rehearsal at Islington.
Looking back, she sees that
symbolic corporate collapse and the
banking crisis that it foreshadowed
as the starting gun for our current
polarised politics, particularly the
populist determination to blame
mass migration for austerity rather
than the black hole created byherself by understanding that “this
is not only a story of what happened
to us, it is a really important story in
understanding what is happening
now in Russia, and in Britain”.
Given that it is a play about
the diffi culties of getting to the
truth, there is an extra premium
on veracity. Prebble dismantles all
the ironies of the obstacles that
Marina Litvinenko faced – whether
they came from the Kremlin with
its familiar blizzard of denial and
diversion – or the offi cial rebuttals
of Chris Grayling , who refused her
legal aid, or Theresa May. There is
a dogged triumph to the eventual
conclusion of the inquiry report
into Litvinenko’s death in which
Sir Robert Owen stated plainly: “I
am sure that Mr [Andrei] Lugovoi
and Mr [Dmitry] Kovtun placed the
polonium-210 in the teapot at the
Millennium hotel on 1 November
2016.” The more often you hear that
line in Prebble’s play the more you
are reminded of George Orwell’sCLOCKWISE FROM
MAIN IMAGE
Alexander Litvinenko
dying in hospital in
2006 and, inset, his
wife, Marina; Jeremy
Strong and Brian
Cox in Succession,
the HBO series
Prebble worked on;
a scene from her
breakthrough play,
Enron. Tristram
Kenton, HBOРЕЛИЗ
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