The New Yorker:

Will Keen and Michael Stuhlbarg, the stars of the play “Patriots,” about the rise of the Russian President, studied how Putin plays table tennis and why his hand trembles.

By Michael Schulman

Boris Berezovsky began his eventful professional life as an obscure Soviet-era mathematician. With the fall of Communism, he became, through ruthlessness and political guile, the most notorious of the post-Soviet oligarchs, amassing billions through oil, air travel, and mass media. His access to, and influence over, Boris Yeltsin reminded some of Grigori Rasputin and his hold over Tsar Nicholas II. In 1996, with Yeltsin debilitated by heart trouble and vodka trouble, Berezovsky and other oligarchs engineered his reëlection. In exchange, Yeltsin presided over bogus auctions to privatize huge state enterprises––auctions that Berezovsky and his allies “won.” Eventually, Berezovsky pushed Vladimir Putin, a mid-level K.G.B. officer, to the forefront of Kremlin politics. When Putin succeeded Yeltsin, Berezovsky had every reason to think he would be as compliant as Yeltsin––a catastrophic miscalculation. Berezovsky turned against Putin, warning of another “authoritarian regime.” He exiled himself to England, where he inveighed against his former protégé and survived several assassination attempts. In 2013, he was found hanged in his bathroom, a black cashmere scarf around his neck. The coroner recorded an “open verdict.”

“He took Putin for who he was, or at least who he presented himself to be,” the actor Michael Stuhlbarg said recently. In the new Broadway play “Patriots,” by Peter Morgan (“The Crown”), Stuhlbarg plays Berezovsky, in feral, face-scrunching fashion. Having just finished a preview, he was having a late supper at the Russian Samovar with Will Keen, the British actor who plays Putin. A waitress named Musa had started with a tour: the bar where Mel Brooks wrote “The Producers”; a doodle that Frank Sinatra had left on a wall, from when the place was Jilly’s, a Rat Pack hangout. She led them upstairs, to a dining room outfitted with samovars and a long table that Mikhail Baryshnikov, one of the restaurant’s founders, had wanted to be strong enough for ten men to stand on. A Polish guy, she said, “gets absolutely shit-faced here, and also sometimes has occasions of state.”

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