A Very Expensive Poison Tickets

A Very Expensive Poison – a play from the espionage headlines

A Very Expensive Poison is a dramatisation of the book of the same name by Luke Harding, which examined the shockingly high profile murder of Alexander Litvinenko using radioactive polonium. It's a story straight out of the most startling annals of international espionage, superbly directed and handled with real political charge for a first run at The Old Vic. Buy or sell A Very Expensive Poison tickets on StubHub as soon as they're available.

An insightful playwright meets a master theatre director

A Very Expensive Poison has been adapted for the stage by playwright Lucy Prebble, who has made an enviable name for herself in theatre circles in a relatively short time. This comes on the heels of previous successful productions that went on to cross the Atlantic, like The Effect and ENRON. It's the type of play in which she specialises: taking shocking events that have hit the world's headlines and presenting them in an unflinching way on stage for the audience to evaluate for themselves. She's a past master at this, and A Very Expensive Poison certainly hasn't disappointed from that point of view. The script is razor-sharp, and she has managed to successfully pick out and dramatise the most key elements of the book in order to draw out her own themes. She has managed to do so very incisively, aided in no small measure by John Crowley, who first directed the play. He's a past winner at the The British Academy Film Awards, leaving the play in capable hands. Get yourself A Very Expensive Poison tickets and see for yourself.

Litvinenko's widow worked with the play's cast

Alexander Litvinenko died mysteriously in hospital in London in 2006 after a short but catastrophic illness. As the mystery cleared it emerged that he had most likely been poisoned by a radioactive chemical. As a former member of Russia's ultra-clandestine secret police, it wasn't a stretch to put the pieces together all the way back to the Kremlin. An international scandal ensued, and the book on which the play is based, "A Very Expensive Poison", was meticulously researched by long-time Moscow correspondent for the Guardian, the aforementioned Luke Harding. He has also published autobiographical accounts of Edward Snowden and Julian Assange, to further bolster his political investigation authorship credentials. A Very Expensive Poison tickets on StubHub promise a faithful account of the story, told from the small stage with taut acting and penetrative dialogue. In the first production Tom Brooke took the lead role, and the play is especially notable for the fact that Marina Litvinenko, Alexander's widow, worked with Prebble and the cast on the creation. It joined other topical plays like Lungs on the honour role of The Old Vic.