Extrem teures Gift (A VERY EXPENSIVE POISON)

In November 2006 the Russian dissident and former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was poisoned in London. He died less than a month later. Litvinenko was a British citizen at the time. His cause of death: polonium – a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. In 2017 Luke Harding, a correspondent for "The Guardian", published a report in which he showed how the political assassination of Litvinenko in the heart of Europe foreshadowed the murders of other Kremlin critics, and how that chain of corruption and death leads straight to Vladimir Putin. A chronicle of a meticulously orchestrated rise to power. 

British playwright and screenwriter Lucy Prebble is known for her adaptations of key events in recent economic and political history. Her play ENRON is a dramatisation of the global financial crash and her television series Succession is based on the life of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. A VERY EXPENSIVE POISON is a political thriller, a bizarre farce and a precise investigative documentary all in one. Prebble paints a keen picture of Alexander Litvinenko and of his wife, Marina, and her (unsuccessful) efforts to take her husband‘ s murderers to justice. 

The play, which was first performed in 2019, will now be shown in Vienna in German language for the first time.