Once con man leaders magic away facts, you are left with spectacle. My favourite scene in Prebble’s hugely enjoyable production comes when two British representatives – a detective and a lawyer – come to arrest Litvinenko’s killers. What happens next is a piece of messy meta-genius. We see a trail of luminous polonium handprints, a dance routine in which the murderers flee, shuffling off stage right, and a poignant last waltz.

Russia is something of an enigma to most people in the west, and our perceptions of the country, its politicians, and history are definitely coloured by what we see in the media. Luke Harding's book seeks to lift some of the veil which surrounds the country in his book 'A very expensive poison' which describes the poisoning of a man named Alexander Litvinenko, allegedly or apparently by agents working on behalf of the Russian government. I remember the events surrounding the poisoning, and while at the time there was a lot of noise made about who was responsible for it, nothing ever seemed to come of it, at least in my country. The Litvinenko story is many things: a horror story from the cold war transplanted to 21st-century London, a parable of Russia’s dark return to authoritarianism, a tale of Jacobean revenge, gruesomely done. It is also a human drama. It is about love and loss. At its centre is Marina Litvinenko – a woman trying to navigate her way to the truth, across a treacherous sea of lies and temporising. Laughable as almost everything about Trump is, for one reason or another the man who would be king appears to increasingly be under the sway of that cold, calculating tyrant in the east. The author, Luke Harding, is an experienced and professional investigative journalist, and one who gives the British Press a good name, unlike some of his trash-flogging colleagues. He was the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent for two years, and the quality of his work can surely only be considered better by the fact that he was expelled from Russia because the Kremlin didn’t like what he had to say about them. Harding also, as seen in the book’s subtitle, documents this as just one act in a continuing push by Putin to make Russia as dominant on the world stage as the USSR while still treating the country as a piggy bank.

Luke Harding served as the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent, and ran into enough trouble there to provide material for his 2011 book, The Mafia State. He has also published works on WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and American whistleblower Edward Snowden. Given his knowledge of Russia and his experience of writing about the underbelly of secret services, the Litvinenko story might seem perfect for him. Armstrong, the show’s British creator, concurs: “Lucy is a dream collaborator. In a writing room you need to invest in the new idea totally, but then be prepared to disregard it brutally. She has a mixture of worldly omnivorous intelligence mixed with come-on-let’s fix-this-enthusiasm. Also, funny.” MyAnna Buring barely allows a tremor in her voice: she is controlled, determined and graceful – like the dancer this widow was; as her husband’s hair starts to fall out from the effects of radiation, she calmly collects it in a plastic hospital cup. Around her is the scarcely human, the fabricated and the farcical. Bungling operatives leave their poison in a hotel room. Reece Shearsmith’s creamy, chilling Putin steals all over the theatre like a lethal gas; Peter Polycarpou’s oligarch bursts into jovial song. A professor takes us calmly through a shadow play about nuclear reactors called Ruslan and Ludymila. Giant puppets of Yeltsin and Brezhnev wander through an apartment, escapees from an axed satirical TV show. In one of the boldest strokes Michael Shaeffer finely delivers a speech about Soviet deaths in the second world war and the effects of shame: it comes just as you think your capacity for sympathy has evaporated. And just when you might think there are too many theatrical swivellings, Buring steps off the stage into the audience. Of course that is another swivel. But that is part of the point. To make you flex your feeling as well as your brain. Given that it is a play about the difficulties of getting to the truth, there is an extra premium on veracity. Prebble dismantles all the ironies of the obstacles that Marina Litvinenko faced – whether they came from the Kremlin with its familiar blizzard of denial and diversion – or the official rebuttals of Chris Grayling, who refused her legal aid, or Theresa May. There is a dogged triumph to the eventual conclusion of the inquiry report into Litvinenko’s death in which Sir Robert Owen stated plainly: “I am sure that Mr [Andrei] Lugovoi and Mr [Dmitry] Kovtun placed the polonium-210 in the teapot at the Millennium hotel on 1 November 2016.” The more often you hear that line in Prebble’s play the more you are reminded of George Orwell’s observation that “In times of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”. Marina Litvinenko continues courageously to pursue the extradition of her husband’s alleged murderers, but she is sanguine about the likelihood of success. “Even if they are brought to justice in 20 years or 30,” she says, “I am still satisfied that they are being punished every day that they wake up and know that they are murderers.” Ripped from the headlines? Yes, but not today's headlines about the poisoning of Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the UK. The poisoning that this book focuses on (although it does explore others) was done in 2006 and the British government did not call Putin out on it, although a 2015 study by a UK judge found that it was probable that Putin was behind the 2006 poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko. It was a messy killing, as the poisoners left quite a radioactive trail behind them.

The author takes us right into the world of intrigue and violence which is going on - often in plain sight - and tells a deeply personal story of what happened, and uncovers the actors who were behind the events, at least to a point. Harding is an experienced reporter, who writes in a clear and very readable style, and you get the sense of his presence there on the front lines. I suppose if a false flag job, or secret mission is pulled off successfully, there is always going to be some element of doubt remaining about the true puppetmasters. The author makes his views fairly clear, and also knows the limits on the information available to him. The author talks about Putin and how he came to be elected the Russian president after Yeltsin and tells the story of the evolution of the Russian secret service after the breakup of the USSR. The reader learns about Litvinenko's career as a member of the Russian secret service, what he did to become that made him escape from Russia and seek asylum in the UK (the US declined to help him).

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I will admit that I knew very little about this case. Like many others, I saw the photograph of Litvinenko in hospital as he lay dying. I read his moving statement and was impressed at his personal bravery and stoical response to events. In fact, he was far braver than I imagined – using his final days to provide the police with as much evidence of the events that had led him to his terrible, and unusual, death. I enjoy reading about contemporary Russia, particularly political, biographical, journalistic and travelogue accounts. Anna Politkovskaya and Svetlana Alexievich stand out for the quality of their work, and for my money Harding is up there alongside them. A combination of readability, great research and first-hand experience make his work an absolute pleasure to read. This story is BONKERS and it's also true. WTF? Putin is nasty, which we already knew. I mean, I knew he had people killed for disagreeing with him and his regime, but I was unaware of the exact extent of it. A lot of the early events here (including Litvinenko's poisoning) happened when I was still in high school in the Rust Belt, and so was not exactly conversational material. Some of the more recent things I was aware of. But GEEZE.