We sat down for an exclusive interview with Director and Co-Owner of Ronin, Alistair Nunn, to discuss Lucy Prebble’s A Very Expensive Poison, which tells the true story of the 2006 poisoning of former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London: part political thriller, part black comedy, and at its heart a love story between Alexander and his wife, Marina.
A Very Expensive Poison runs from 28th-31st October at the Old Fire Station, Oxford – Tickets here
Lucy Prebble’s play turns a real state assassination into black comedy without, as Ronin puts it, making the victim the object of the joke. How do you direct that tonal balance so that the absurdity exposes the machinery of power rather than diminishing the human tragedy at the centre of the story?
The most important thing when directing a play like this is to remember the human cost at its centre. Sure, the machinery of Putin’s state is often bumbling and ridiculous. But it’s also heartless and cruel. You can push those scenes a bit, revel a bit in the stupidity and greed of incompetent assassins. But you balance that by giving the Litvinenkos the humanity they deserve. You can never lose sight of the victims, a loving couple working to make their world a better place. The trick is meshing that together. Prebble does this extremely well by having Marina (in particular) talk to the audience, flagging up the absurdities – but also the bitter consequences. This constantly puts us with the victims – we laugh with them but don’t forget the cost.
The play is nearly twenty years removed from Alexander Litvinenko’s death, yet its questions about state power, disinformation and the value of truth arguably feel even more urgent now. Has that contemporary context changed how you read the play, or how you want an audience in 2026 to experience it?
What’s rather alarming about A Very Expensive Poison is, if anything, Putin has got considerably worse since 2006. The play debuted a year after another appallingly ruthless (and even more clumsy) assassination attempt in Salisbury (2018). Since then, we’ve had the Ukraine war, which shattered any illusion that a regime with a track record of murdering its critics and fighting a brutal war in Chechnya was one we could work with. A Very Expensive Poison shows us everything we needed to know was always there. It also shows how easily a narcissistic bully like Putin tells blatant lies and how much Russian money and power stretched its tendrils into the UK. You could argue you can see Crypto billionaires attempting the same thing today. But they’re still less awful than Putin.
The story contains something almost theatrically impossible: a radioactive murder trail stretching across hotels, restaurants, aircraft and public spaces. What excites you about translating something so sprawling, invisible and politically complex into a live theatrical language?
One of the things that drew us to this was how fast-paced and dynamic it is. I often think too much theatre gets focused on scale – grand sets, sprawling tableaus etc. What we’re working on is embracing the idea that a lot of it happens in Sasha and Marina’s memories. This means we can quickly and smoothly rearrange tables and chairs to become totally different places. This inventiveness, we think, is exciting for audiences. Moving away from the sprawl allows our shows to focus on character and story – which, we think, are at the heart of all good theatre and drama. Complex staging can’t polish a production where people don’t care about those two things.
At the heart of the play is the relationship between Alexander and Marina Litvinenko. When the surrounding world is deliberately chaotic, farcical and grotesque, how do you protect that relationship from becoming merely the emotional counterweight to the satire, and allow it to have its own dramatic force?
A Very Expensive Poison always makes sure this relationship remains at the core of everything we see. It’s a relationship that feels very true. Two people who are very much in love, but that doesn’t mean they don’t argue or fight. They’re also not perfect people: Sasha’s secretive and stubbornly certain of his unquestionable moral purity; Marina can be waspish and judgemental. But they are a loyal team and A Very Expensive Poison frequently gives us small moments where we see the happiness of their everyday lives. These moments feel very real – we’ve worked really hard to make this relationship feel lived in and close, which gives it a real emotional weight. The dark comedy of the play only works through caring about these two real people caught in the middle of it.
Ronin has built a repertoire around modern and contemporary work including Collaborators, The Effect, Young Marx, Quiz and A Mirror. As both director and co-owner, what makes a play feel distinctly “Ronin” to you, and where does A Very Expensive Poison sit within the artistic identity you are building for the company?
We want to bring an exciting mix of shows to Oxford and we want to stage plays that tell engaging and interesting stories about people who feel real and exciting. We also like to mix between thematic heavy-hitters and comedies. We’ve done dystopian dramas (Foxfinder), literary comedies (The Watsons), complex romances (The Effect), comic family feuds (Rules for Living), censorship thrillers (A Mirror), farces (Young Marx), romances (Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons) and torn from headlines dramas (Quiz). A Very Expensive Poison is a sort of wonderful amalgamation of loads of these themes, with brilliant writing and some really interesting staging possibilities. It fits right in with what we are trying to do!
The play asks audiences to laugh at incompetence while confronting the fact that this incompetence still resulted in a man’s death. Do you think that laughter creates moral distance, or can it actually make an audience more alert to the horror of what happened—and how much responsibility does a director have for shaping that response?
Laughter isn’t always simple. There is something Laurel and Hardy-esque about the incompetence of Litvinenko’s assassins, who needed multiple run-ups to poison their man. It’s more funny, because they come from a regime which prides itself on being ruthlessly efficient. Even Litvinenko sometimes finds their ineptitude darkly funny. Contrasts like that are always a source of comedy.
But that doesn’t change the fact it succeeds. Part of directing is knowing when to take the comedy out. When to play it completely straight, without lecturing. And part of what makes the trauma powerful, is that we’ve seen the victims tell us “Yeah, this part was absurd” and acknowledging that doesn’t diminish their pain. When directing, I often keep these moments simple – especially in a play full of razzle and dazzle like this, moments of quietness and reflection carry real impact.