The Enron playwright talks about retelling the murder of the KGB whistleblower, our surreal political era, and how Billie Piper helped her through dark times

Lucy Prebble operates an “elephant in the room” method when it comes to writing plays: she tries to take on the biggest overlooked ideas that shape our world.

“In theatre there is always a lot of very tasteful, refined work,” she says. “I wouldn’t be dismissive of that. But it doesn’t feel very representative of life at the moment, which feels to me quite ugly and lacking taste and unrefined. Rambunctious.”

Sitting cross-legged on a sofa in the back offices of the Old Vic theatre, Prebble, 38, is quick to find a self-deprecating angle to things. In a summer dress and with an open smile she does not look like a firestarter, but don’t be fooled. Her new play, which I have only read, but which comes to vivid life on the page, is a dramatisation of the murder by poisoning of the former KGB whistleblower and British citizen Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. It is loosely a spy drama, but it is not John le Carré. “It is,” Prebble suggests, “hopefully quite crude, a bit crass. There is this British idea of espionage having elegant cufflinks, but that is perhaps not the brutal reality.” The Russian agents who murdered Litvinenko by putting polonium-210 into his teapot were blundering stooges, not elite operatives.

The play is based on the book A Very Expensive Poison, by the Guardian’s Luke Harding, which followed the belated 2016 inquiry into Litvinenko’s murder. Harding could not be more enthused about the way that Prebble has brought to life the “awful mixture of playfulness and ghoulishness” at the heart of the story. “The terrible death of Alexander Litvinenko is like something out of John Webster,” he said to me, speaking about the play. “But at the same time there is something comically absurd about these two moronic assassins wandering around London with this powerful poison – they don’t know quite what it is – strewing radiation all around the place, trying to pick up women, going for rides in cycle rickshaws. What Lucy captures really well is this clash of incompetence and malevolence.”

Some of that tone, and the comic, expressive way she articulates it, will be familiar to audiences of Prebble’s breakthrough play, Enron, which skewered the hubris and banality of boardroom greed, while also offering a nuanced song-and-dance primer on the forces that collapsed the world’s economy.

She says she tries to wait for stories to announce themselves to her. “I am not the sort of writer who wants to have plays on all the time, exploring aspects of me. I think it is a big ask to get people to come out spending money and sit in these seats. I think I won’t bother people unless it feels quite important. And this to me felt quite important.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest MyAnna Buring and Tom Brooke in rehearsal for A Very Expensive Poison. Photograph: Manuel Harlan

Importance, for Prebble, is about portents. She was sent Harding’s book to read at the beginning of 2017. The Salisbury poisonings hadn’t happened yet, but Trump had just come to power. Her excitement about writing the play boiled down to the sense that “there was something in the present that I felt was explained by this story”.

When she interrogated that feeling, it was to do with the way that the surreal had crept up to become commonplace in our lives. The absurdist criminality of the poisoning of Litvinenko felt like a harbinger of all that we have been experiencing for the past five years, in a way; reality being knocked out of shape by forces beyond our control. “It’s about sudden shifts in the boundaries of what is normal,” Prebble says. “We all thought Trump definitely won’t get in. Or Brexit definitely won’t happen, and then each time the reality shifts you have to adjust.” From there it is not far to the idea of “nothing is true and everything is possible”.

Theatre seemed the perfect place to explore the unsettling spectacle of politics. Though Prebble has been widely acclaimed as one of the significant dramatists of her generation, she doesn’t think of herself as a woman of the theatre, necessarily. Her first loves were video games and books rather than plays or films. When she was taken along to theatre as a girl – she grew up in Haslemere in Surrey, the youngest daughter of an IT consultancy director – she says she always felt a bit embarrassed for the performers, asking us to make believe. But at a time when real life has become harder to trust she has grown to understand the power – and dramatic irony – of having real people sit in a darkened room and collectively suspend disbelief.

The Litvinenko case, in which such shadowy figures as Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Putin become rival puppeteers, was a perfect vehicle to expose the distortions of the truth. Even so, the more Prebble read about it, the more that cerebral scaffolding contrasted with the human tragedy at the heart of it. Much of her drama is focused on the emergency room of Barnet and Chase Farm hospital in north London, where Marina and Alexander (Sasha) Litvinenko found themselves trying to explain to British police detectives what might have happened.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marina Litvinenko in 2016, holding the results of the inquiry into the death of her husband, Alexander. Photograph: Carl Court/Getty Images

Prebble met Marina Litvinenko many times to discuss the story with her. The first time – after she had been introduced by Harding – was with trepidation: “partly because I didn’t want to feel sort of beholden to her as a writer,” she says. “But also because she had been through this terrible tragedy, and obviously I didn’t want to misrepresent the truth emotionally.”

Prebble need not have worried. Marina Litvinenko proved not only an enthusiast for the project “but really playful, very twinkly, quite dry”. Prebble told her how a stage play – particularly her stage play – would be different from a book, in that it would be going feet first into emotional areas. Litvinenko understood that. “She told me two things that I valued hugely,” Prebble says. “The first was: please don’t forget the cost to our lives of what happened. And the second thing was: please don’t forget that this is a love story.”

The day after I interviewed Prebble last week, I spoke to Marina Litvinenko on the phone about the play. She explained how at the beginning of the rehearsal process she had been in to meet the cast and give as much detail about the people as she could. “Not only about my character and Sasha’s character, but about the meetings in Russia and the politics.” She liked how enthusiastic the cast were “to try to understand more and more about what happened” – reflecting her own personal mission for the past 13 years.

Litvinenko has long got used to the surreal, but it was a different level of strangeness to be briefing actors pretending to be her and her late husband. She squared this with herself by understanding that “this is not only a story of what happened to us, it is a really important story in understanding what is happening now in Russia, and in Britain”.

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.”

Does she think that Prebble’s play can advance her demands for justice?

She says that the current Russian regime is “without shame”, though she believes the current protests in Moscow indicate that change will come. She worries more, she says, about “how many times the British government are going to make the same mistakes. In 2000 when Blair believed he was in a good relationship with Putin it finished in a bad one in 2006. David Cameron thought he could build a new relationship and it didn’t happen. Let us see what happens with the new prime minster…”

We both laugh.

“Actually,” she says, “I would like Boris Johnson to watch this play. That would be a good start for him.”

Prebble says that a primary concern in the writing was to bring the intimacy of the Litvinenkos’ marriage to the stage. They bicker and banter affectionately in the hospital as they try to get the story straight.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alexander Litvinenko on his hospital bed after being poisoned in London in 2006. Photograph: Natasja Weitsz

The mystified medical and police response in the play is a reminder of how hard it was to find a context for the poisoning at the time. “If we had placed Putin at all in 2006,” Prebble says, “it was as someone we could probably do business with. Obviously now looking back, the poisoning seems like an experiment in pushing boundaries. If the Blair government and the Cameron government had reacted more strongly, then perhaps we would not be where we are.”

Harding agrees. But even when he wrote his book in 2016 he was convinced that the Kremlin “would never order this kind of thing again, because the fallout was so disastrous”. But then the Skripal poisoning happened in Salisbury, almost a copycat crime.

Does he believe they did so to prove that they could do so?

“I think Skripal was a huge V-sign to the British establishment,” Harding says. “It said: you are weak, a declining power in the world; you will be friendless after Brexit and we can do this kind of thing on your territory any time we like. And what’s more we can joke about it afterwards.”

One of the things that concentrated Prebble’s mind in shaping the tone of her play was those disturbing Russian TV interviews with the perpetrators of the Salisbury attack, speaking about their interest in visiting the city to view the cathedral’s famous spire. “It is the satire that Putin has always used,” she says. “This idea of you know I’m lying, but we are bonded together in this smirking joke.”

We talk about how that principle has been exported – with examples that include Donald Trump’s more bizarre Twitter delusions to Boris Johnson’s fantasies about making buses out of wine crates. The thread is that the joke is on those who would seek conventional truth; the punchline is that truth does not matter, when you have power.

Prebble’s play seeks to undermine that relationship. She puts Putin centre stage, initially as a kind of David Brent figure. “He is shorter than you think,” reads her first stage direction about the president.

“I thought quite hard about whether or not to include him,” she says. “Not out of fear or anything, but because the mythologising is something he clearly enjoys.”

We live in a world, I say, increasingly dominated by authoritarian men whose greatest fears are being laughed at or ignored.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Samuel West as Jeffrey Skilling in the original production of Enron at the Minerva Theatre, Chichester. Photograph: Donald Cooper / Rex Features

“What the play is about in some sense,” she says, “is how we manage male humiliation. All women know the dangers of being around a man who has been humiliated – it is an emotion that can shift quickly into anger and aggression. If that happens en masse, whether it is Russia after the cold war, or parts of Britain or the midwest after the collapse of manufacturing, it creates great potential for anger, and for the political forces that can exploit that.”

I last spoke to Prebble about some of those issues in an interview a decade ago, when her play Enron was in rehearsal at Islington. Looking back, she sees that symbolic corporate collapse and the banking crisis that it foreshadowed as the starting gun for our current polarised politics, particularly the populist determination to blame mass migration for austerity rather than the black hole created by millionaire money managers.

Enron began as a great success story for her. Rupert Goold’s production gained five-star critical acclaim and transferred for a sell-out season in the West End that made it seem a nailed-on hit for Broadway. In fact, however, after lukewarm previews and hostile reviews, the major New York production closed after only 10 days. That must have come as a shock?

“Shock implies I was expecting it to go well,” she says, with a quick laugh. “And as my family would tell you, I don’t approach life like that. I wish I did. But it wasn’t just a critical mauling over there; audiences didn’t like it.”

She is not completely sure why. It would be too easy, she insists, to say that the Americans didn’t want a clever young British woman exposing and ridiculing the corruption of Wall Street. “Hamilton is the perfect American show,” she says. “The struggle and the optimism and the triumph. It’s brilliant. But I have a bleaker sensibility. For some people my plays can feel like being hit over the head with information all the time.”

Prebble wrote another play, The Effect, based on the clinical trial for a new anti-depressant, which among other things questioned whether emotion manipulated by chemicals was for real. After that there has been a seven-year gap until the Litvinenko play. Why was that?

“Honestly?” Prebble says. “The truth is I had a really rough few years personally. I think I had a bit of a breakdown, looking back. I only use that word because that is exactly what it felt like.”

She doesn’t want to go into the specifics (“it’s not just my story”) except to say “I had a lot of loss in my life in a very short period”. The result was that she became somewhat paralysed creatively. “I thought depression was about smashing things up, or staying in bed all the time,” she says. “But for me it was this kind of impossibility of making even the smallest decisions. It felt like there was no centre from which I was acting. I lost a lot of confidence.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I love Lucy as a person’: Prebble with her friend Billie Piper. Photograph: Dan Wooller/Shutterstock

She found it harder and harder to write. She did a pilot for an HBO series starring Sarah Silverman, “someone I really admire and love”. HBO dropped it. “Everyone was looking to me to be the American idea of the showrunner,” she says, “and I was at my least confident at that point.”

What was the HBO story about?

“It was a show about a woman who works in the computer-games industry and falls in love with a guy and moves to London to be with him. And finds herself being a stepmother to his kids and hating it. It was supposed to be funny but it came out bleak.”

As a result of that Prebble “had that bad feeling that I’d had a great opportunity and squandered it and felt the shame of that.” There were other ideas that she tried to write but which didn’t get a good reaction and were immediately abandoned.

A few things helped her through that period, she says. One was friendship. She talks very warmly about her closeness to Billie Piper, the actress with whom she first worked on the ITV adaptation of The Secret Diary of a Call Girl – a difficult TV baptism for both of them. Piper also later starred in The Effect.

Speaking later about her friendship with Prebble, Piper agrees with the playwright’s suggestion that they are mutual muses as well as mates. “As much as I love Lucy as a person and care about her emotionally I am also really interested in her,” Piper told me. “She fascinates me as a woman.”

Some of that fascination comes from watching Prebble work. “It’s funny,” Piper says. “Lucy starts with really big themes. With The Effect it was about a drug trial and whether love was real or a placebo itself. A really big bold intellectual idea, but then she finds the human story in it.”

For a time, when Prebble was struggling, the pair of them “were constantly on the phone handling each other’s emotional stuff.” Piper had been on at her friend for years to work together again on TV “but the experience was so traumatic the first time around that it has taken this long to get back on board”. The pair have been working on something for about three years that is finally going into production in the autumn.

What is the story?

“It is about two women in their 30s and how different that looks to being a woman in your 20s,” Piper says. “We’ve both been through our fair share of crisis and we want to see if we can speak a bit for our generation. Or at least that’s the plan…. ”

It took Prebble a while to get herself back to the point where she was sure she had something to say. As well as friendships there were a couple of professional experiences that helped her to regain her writer’s voice. The first was accepting an offer to work on a video game called, appropriately enough, Destiny, out in Seattle. Prebble went over to help them with their storytelling. She found the experience of playing a bit part to animators and designers “very comforting; also there was a child version of myself who was in love with video games”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Prebble enjoyed her work on the HBO show Succession, which is soon to begin a second season. Photograph: AP

The second thing that helped to restore her confidence was the HBO series Succession. Jesse Armstrong’s compulsive dynastic drama, which chronicles the comic machinations of a billionaire media family (with echoes of the Murdochs and the Redstones) evolved into a box-set King Lear.

Prebble was initially approached to work on it by her American agent. “They said ‘do you want to be a writer in the room?’” she recalls – no longer the lead. “So I went in at a little bit of a low ebb – but it was just the most life-changing, brilliant environment. That self-protective thing that can be common in theatre – ‘don’t mess with my words!’ – wasn’t there. All these brilliant comic writers would say, ‘I’ve written this but it’s a bit shit, can you help?’ I’d never had that before but it was like coming home.”

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.”

Prebble suggests she emerged from the team experience of writing the first series “almost as if I had been rebuilt”. Season two of Succession airs on 12 August; she has just finished work on the final episode.

Prebble found another strand of conviction on social media. She has long been a caustic Twitterer. “I withdrew to social media for a while,” she says. “As someone very invested in games and tech as a kid, I felt like I was reminding myself of what sort of stuff I would say if I could say anything.”

I swapped my world for a virtual one – and I loved what I found Read more

She has, she says, tried to bring all of that spirit to her play. Without wanting to sound too grand, she suggests that it feels like a political moment to stand up and be counted. “I don’t want to look back later in life and think: ‘what was I doing then?’” she says.

At the end of her play, she turns that challenge back to her audience. Much of the artifice that drives the play dissolves and the Marina Litvinenko character engages directly with the theatregoers.

“There was a time when my absolute nightmare would have been some actor coming up and talking to me in the audience,” Prebble says. “As I’ve got older, and I’ve been through lots of life experiences and done therapy I realise that those kinds of fears are not healthy. Not allowing yourself to take part and be vulnerable isn’t good for you.”

You mean people should think about being actors as well as spectators in our current politics?

“Exactly. So at the end of this – and it sounds wanky obviously – I wanted to make the point that we are all a bit responsible for the society we have created. ‘Oh dearism’ – that refrain that everything is bad and none of it is our fault – that is exactly what those in power want.”

She laughs, talks about some of the anxieties of dramatising those concerns with 25 actors. “The fact is,” she says, returning to the rehearsal room in her head, “This is a risky, clumsy motherfucker, this play. If it goes down in flames, it goes down in flames. But,” she says, “I really think it is the right thing for now.”

A Very Expensive Poison runs at the Old Vic, London SE1, from 20 August until 5 October. Lucy Prebble, Marina Litvinenko and Luke Harding will discuss the poisoning at a Guardian Live event at Kings Place, London on 2 September. Book tickets at membership.theguardian.com