PATRIOTISM, as Dr Johnson famously said, ‘is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. Peter Morgan pushes that idea to its limits in his grippingly intelligent play, Patriots, which opened last year at the Almeida and which has now transferred to the Noël Coward Theatre. If anything, the play has gained even greater resonance with time: when we hear Vladimir Putin denounced as ‘a nationalistic dictator interested in rebuilding a Russian superstate’, we feel a chill of recognition.
The words are spoken by the billionaire oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whose rise and fall lies at the heart of the play. A mathematical genius in his youth, Berezovsky uses his financial acumen
