Anyone who owns a television will be familiar with the furrowed brow of Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, president of the Russian Federation. His special type of politics is one that takes heavily from the art of performance, a strategy documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis credits for Putin’s rise and sustained position in power since 2000.

It is this art of performance that British playwright Lucy Prebble applies liberally in her 2019 play A Very Expensive Poison.

New Theatre’s A Very Expensive Poison. Photo © Bob Seary

Based on the book of the same name by journalist Luke Harding, it tells the true story of the radioactive poisoning of Russian defector and former detective Alexander Litvinenko (played here by Richard Cox) on British soil in 2006.

Of course, to truly understand the motive behind any murder, you must go back to where it all started, and so Prebble takes us back to Litvinenko’s time at the FSB (formerly the KGB) and his steady commitment to uncover corruption within the FSB by exposing links between organised crime and the Russian government.

His persistence lands him on Putin’s (played with juicy satire by Tasha O’Brien) bad side and...