The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to
the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union
The Evening Standard, 13th April
2005, Nicholas de Jongh
Two
Soviet Union cosmonauts, floating through a starry night, all adrift in outer space,
set the allegorical tone for David Greig’s intriguing meditation on our chronic
failure to connect and communicate, despite inexhaustible desire for closeness.
In form dreamlike and metaphoric, in style yoking the realistic, comic,
fantastic and mystic, Greig effects spiritual and actual links between
characters variously discovered in Edinburgh, London, Provence, Oslo and beyond
our world.
The
tensions and alienation of Tim Supple’s production are reinforced by Melly
Still’s romantic stage set. Silver terrace doors, a backcloth of stars and
black skies, cosmonauts on wires somersaulting or seemingly suspended in space,
help achieve a more vivid atmosphere than during the play’s prosaic London run
in 1999.
‘The
Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet
Union’, as the full title has it, still needs the pruning of its more
repetitive and irritating off-shoots, yet its obscurities matter less now that
Greig’s ‘Pyrenees’ is being performed at the Menier Chocolate Factory. For that
play serves as a kind of thematic preface to this. Its central character Keith,
a middle-aged, married civil servant on the run from his own life, also appears
in ‘The Cosmonaut’s Last Message’, though at an earlier chronological date.
Played
with a suitable blend of ardour and discontent by Michael Pennington, Keith
tires of his wife (Brid Brennan) and falls for Anna Madeley’s seductive
Nastasja. The girl still mourning the loss of her cosmonaut father who vanished
into the black hole of space when she was just six manages no more than a brief
sexual lull with Keith before being passed on to Tom Goodman-Hill’s sinister,
taciturn Norwegian, who is negotiating a peace treaty between two warring
countries but cannot manage his own human relations.
The
keynotes of existential loneliness are spectacularly and chillingly expressed
by the doomed Soviet cosmonauts, Oleg and Casimir. Paul Higgins and Sean
Campion ruefully, but misguidedly, play these space travellers with Scottish
accents. The Russians know they will never return to Earth and variously hanker
for a changed country, daughter and a brief-time lover. They set the paradigm
for the play’s failed communicators, of whom Bernard, a space-agency scientist
trying to communicate with aliens in space, makes the strangest impression in
Greig’s poetic lament for life-losers.
Daily Express, 13th April 2005,
Sheridan Morley
‘The
Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved’ is as strange as its
title, so we had better start with what we know to be true.
Back
in December 1991, as control of the Kremlin passed from Gorbachev to Yeltsin, a
luckless Soviet astronaut was orbiting the earth. All the while he was
wondering whether anybody down there still cared, or even if there would be a
down there to go home to. And if so, run by whom?
That
idea – of a spaceman lost in space because events on earth are no longer within
the control of the people who sent him up there in the first place – might have
made for an intriguing if bleakly funny play but it is not the one Greig has
chosen to give us here.
True,
there are a couple of bewildered spacemen hovering above the stage in the hope
of finding out something, anything, about what is going on either around them
or below them. But, as Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead’,
it seems they are doomed to know nothing and discover even less.
Instead,
David Greig is concerned with the nature of loss: people lost in space, in relationships,
in love, people lost in marriage or because strokes make them unable to
communicate, people for whom language is a barrier and national identity a
higher one. Only ‘Connect’ might have been a better title here, if it hadn’t
already been used.
Nearly
all of a strong cast at the Donmar Warehouse – led by Brid Brennan, Michael
Pennington and Anna Madeley - play double roles. By the end we have met so many
characters it is more than a little difficult to figure out which ones we are
really supposed to connect with, though that of course is their problem too.
Greig
is a young Scots dramatist with a good line in bleak encounters. He takes
random snapshots of contemporary life and then wonders, with us, if they add up
to anything very coherent. The problem is that he never quite manages to join
up the dots, so we are left searching for a patter. His art is that of the
short-story writer.
We
are in need of a little more guidance if we are to start to care about any of
it, let alone understand why communication proves so impossible even for those
not on the ends of crackling two-way telephones.
Daily Mail, 13th April 2005,
Quentin Letts
Ever
since David Bowie’s song ‘Space Oddity’ I have been enthralled by the idea of
the astronaut stuck in space.
Playwright
David Greig was therefore at an immediate advantage with his brilliant title
for this drama.
What
does a doomed cosmonaut say to mission control after 12 years in space? Does he
ask to be put in radio contact with his wife, or girlfriend, or mother, or
daughter? Does he try to hold on, contemplate the world beneath him, or simply
go bonkers?
What
a great idea, and what an interesting night seemed to be in store at the
normally slick Donmar. Wrong. David Greig probes so far into his own twilight
zone that the poor ruddy theatregoer is left floating in a vacuum.
Much
of the action takes place not in space but on Earth, where Michael Pennington
plays a man with a mid-life crisis.
Anna
Madeley plays his Russian girlfriend (who happens to be the daughter of the
stranded cosmonaut).
Amid
gratuitously coarse language, Tom Goodman-Hill does a stolid job as Eric, a
Norwegian banker. Brid Brennan acts her heart out as a cuckolded wife and,
later, as a lesbian-minded striper. Confused? So was I.
Miss
Madeley, quite moving when she talks of her distant Daddy, is an exceedingly
leggy number and keeps showing a lot of flesh.
Mr
Pennington’s character also discards his clothes – all of them.
He
does it when making an apparent suicide bid, which given the state of the plot
at that point seems understandable.
Just
to confuse matters even more, several of the actors double up with secondary
roles.
The
whole thing becomes as baffling as a scrambled signal from Star City to Mir.
At
the core of it all I suspect there are clever reasons here about the loneliness
of life and how we all live in solitary capsules. But Mr Greig’s conceits are
so self-indulgent that they should never have been allowed near the launch pad.
The Times, 14th April 2005, Ian
Johns
This
is a busy month for David Greig. His latest play, ‘Pyrenees’, is running in
London. His next drama, ‘The American Pilot’, for the Royal Shakespeare
Company, is about to open in Stratford. Now we have this revival of a 1999 work
that can seem as long and elusive as its title: ‘The Cosmonaut’s Last Message
to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union’.
As
someone might say in a Jerry Bruckheimer blockbuster: “What we have here,
people, is a failure to communicate.”
All
the characters in Greig’s play, from a pair of quarrelling cosmonauts stranded
in forgotten orbit to a middle-aged couple, reach in vain to possess someone or
something that cannot or will not respond.
In
the first of a series of fateful associations with which Greig binds together
the play’s transient world of airport lounges, hotels, strip clubs and suburban
flats, Keith, a Scottish bureaucrat, is having an affair with the pole-dancer
daughter of one of the cosmonauts. She then becomes the obsessive object of
desire of Eric, a globe-trotting Norwegian banker.
Vivienne,
Keith’s speech-therapist wife, later looks into her husband’s apparent suicide
(a search continued in ‘Pyrenees’) and befriends a French scientist obsessed
with UFOs. He thinks he has detected a faint signal from space. You can guess
from where.
Greig
sees us inhabiting separate orbits, sometimes intersecting but usually solitary
and never far from loss. Into this tapestry of isolation, he ironically weaves
common elements: the Scottish and Irish accents used regardless of nationality;
jaunts to the Isle of Skye and watery suicides.
The
play’s daisy chain of thematic motifs is initially intriguing but grows
precious and finally sucks the life out of the characters. From the white noise
of a broken TV to the frustration of a stroke victim trying to order his
thoughts, every aspect in the play is a slavish servant to the same point about
our struggle to make contact.
Tim
Supple’s production, as cool and measured as the writing, has Paul Higgins and
Sean Campion, as the sometimes mordantly funny spacemen musing on life, death
and women, suspended across a starry sky above the earth-bound action. Michael Pennington,
doubling as the errant Keith and the French boffin, Anna Madeley as the Russian
daughter and a Scottish policewoman, and Brid Brennan as Vivienne and a lesbian
dancer give some welcome vitality.
Yet
at the end the human tales have become so fragmented and drawn out that the
whole thing becomes lost in space. We’ve got the message but it’s hard to feel
anyone’s pain. As we all know, in space no one can hear you scream.
The Daily Telegraph, 14th April
2005, Charles Spencer
The
Scottish dramatist David Greig is 36 and has already written 37 plays. Even the
wildly prolific Alan Ayckbourn didn’t achieve Shakespeare’s tally until he was
50, and it has to be admitted that Greig has come up with some stinkers in his
time. More can sometimes mean less.
He
is currently on a roll, however, and increasingly strikes me as one of the most
interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation. His work
ranges from the wildly avant-garde to the traditionally well-crafted, and you
never know where he is going to jump next.
His
superb play ‘Pyrenees’ is currently selling out at the Menier Chocolate
Factory, and next month the RSC premières a new piece, ‘The American Pilot’, in
Stratford.
The
astute Donmar has clearly recognised that Greig is a writer whose time has come,
and is offering this high-profile revival of ‘The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the
Former Soviet Union’, first seen in 1999. It blew me away than, and proves just
as potent the second time around, combining wit with heartfelt emotion.
It
seems typical of Greig that the piece never stays in the same place for long. The
action ranges from Edinburgh to Oslo and Provence, from a pole-dancing club in
Soho to a Russian space station where the two-man crew have lost contact with
ground control and been orbiting the planet for the last 12 years, unaware that
the Soviet Union no longer exists.
Other,
apparently separate story lines concern a married, middle-aged Edinburgh civil
servant, who has embarked on a tempestuous affair with an exotic dancer, a
sinister peace negotiator from the World Bank, and an old scientist beaming
messages into space in the hope of a response from UFOs.
Plot
links and poignant leitmotifs bind the characters together (an impression
intensified by the fact that the same
actors double up in different roles), and an overriding theme emerges of human
loneliness and our desperate need to make contact with others.
Living
in a stale marriage, Greig movingly suggest, can be just as desolate as
drifting aimlessly in space. What all his characters seek is recognition and
the fond return of love; and the writer displays a rare, unsentimental empathy
for their plight.
Tim
Supple’s production scores a theatrical coup in its portrayal of the two
cosmonauts, floating weightlessly in space against a cyclorama of twinkling
stars, but he and designer Melly Still are less successful at atmospherically
establishing the wide variety of locations on earth.
There
are some terrific performances though, from Paul Higgins and Sean Campion as
the abandoned lovelorn cosmonauts, and from Michael Pennington and Brid Brennan
as the unhappily married couple, whose story is further developed in ‘Pyrenees’,
the second part of a planned trilogy.
Best
of all is the sensationally alluring Anna Madeley as the spunky Russian
pole-dancer Nastasja, desperately yearning for her father, lost in space. Here’s
a star in the making if ever I saw one.
Teletext, 14th April 2005, Ian
Shuttleworth
The
finest play in London at the moment is ‘Pyrenees’ by David Greig: a beautiful
resonant piece about how people do and don’t make contact with one another,
physically, emotionally and verbally.
It’s
a glorious coincidence that, in the same month, another venue has revived Greig’s
1999 play with two of the latter piece’s main characters. They make a
magnificent pairing, even in quite different productions.
‘The
Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union’
– to give it its full title – contains several plot strands.
Middle-aged
Keith, realising his affair with young Russian Nastasja is doomed, fakes
suicide and vanishes. She hooks up with the financier Eric, while Keith’s wife
begins a long search for him.
Nastasja’s
“loneliness” is because her father is “in the sky” these 12 years. Casimir is
not dead and in heaven, though: he’s in a Soviet space station, stranded with
another cosmonaut. When the political map was redrawn, the two of them were
left up there, forgotten.
They
continue orbiting the earth; unable to communicate with the loved ones they can
hardly even remember.
The
two actors hang suspended in harnesses, behind a gauze which doubly separates
them from the other action.
Greig’s
great skill is that he doesn’t lay it all out for you, but nor does he make you
feel he’s forcing you to labour at decoding the play’s message.
He
works by hints, echoes and leaving gaps between the lines – and before you know
it, you’re immersed in a rich symphony of thoughts and feelings.
He’s
probably the most consistently fascinating Scottish playwright working today,
and I’m an unashamed fan.
This
play works less well than the companion piece. It’s a bigger canvas, which
means you need to stand further off in order to get the whole picture, if you
see what I mean.
Nevertheless,
it’s a thing of beauty, and the cast – including Brid Brennan, Michael Pennington
and Anna Madeley – are pretty uniformly strong.
More
people should know about David Greig’s work and this is a fine way to start.
Metro, 14th April 2005, Maxie
Szalwinska
David
Greig must be in playwright heaven: this revival of ‘Cosmonaut….’ comes while an
eerily lovely staging of its companion piece, ‘Pyrenees’, is still on at the
Menier Chocolate Factory. Both plays are stirring but, while ‘Pyrenees’ is
tidier, the ambitious sprawl of ‘Cosmonaut….’ is more rewarding.
As
two bickering Russian cosmonauts drift forgotten in space, we watch scenes from
life on Earth. Communications have broken down between an irascible Scottish
civil servant (Michael Pennington) and his speech therapist wife (Brid
Brennan). The daughter of one of the cosmonauts, exotic dancer Nastasja (Anna
Madeley) gets involved with Eric (Tom Goodman-Hill), a possessive Norwegian
peace negotiator, but cares only for her long-lost father. Meanwhile, a French stargazer
is searching for signs of life.
The
various plots orbit each other and Greig shows us the static that interferes with
people making emotional contact. Tim Supple’s production captures both the
inchoate romanticism and humour of the play and the cast, doubling up on their
parts, all have a chance to shine. If her accent is shaky, Anna Madeley burns
so brightly as the cosmonaut’s daughter you fear she’ll be snuffed out. Like staring
at the night sky, ‘Cosmonaut….’ leaves us spaced out.
The Guardian, 15th April 2005,
Lyn Gardner
In
‘The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet
Union’, Oleg and Casimir are Soviet cosmonauts who have been stranded in space
for decades, continually orbiting an Earth that has forgotten all about them
and moved on with the collapse of communism. Vivienne is a speech therapist
whose husband, Keith, is having an affair with Nastasja, a pole-dancer, who is
the daughter of Casimir. When Keith goes missing, Vivienne tries to find him
and comes into contact with Bernard, a former rocket scientist who thinks that
someone from outer space is trying to contact us.
Those
are just a few strands in David Greig’s 1999 play – an extraordinary, complex
web of chance meetings, lost-and-found connections and failures to communicate.
It is set in a world of airports, anonymous bars and subterranean clubs where
everyone wants something that keeps eluding them.
Greig
sets so many plates spinning that it’s a wonder he can keep them all going. He does,
but only just, and it is pretty hard work for the audience, who must turn
detective. This is one of those plays that you end up admiring more than liking
– partly because its cinematic construction and the way it hops all over the
place makes it hard to really engage with any of the characters.
You
can praise Greig and his director, Tim Supple, for the way they capture the
cool sense of dislocation and millennium madness, but it doesn’t help you get
any nearer the heart of this drama. I am beginning to think this may be one of
those rare plays that reads brilliantly but doesn’t quite work on stage: this
is the third major production in six years. Melly Still’s design looks great,
but demands some clunky scene changing. The acting, though, is wonderfully
elegant: the actors double with brilliant insouciance. It may be an elusive
evening, but it is never a dull one.
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