Say what you like about the Soviet system...at least the Moscow metro always ran on time. Unlike London's Jubilee line, which came to a halt because of a power failure which began around 6.30 pm last night as I was on my way to the Hampstead theatre to see Rona Munro's new play about the early years of the Soviet space programme. After a long detour from Westminster via Baker Street and the 82 bus, I arrived at the launch pad after the countdown had already finished and missed the first scene of the play. Nobody's really to blame for this, except possibly for the engineers who designed the Jubilee Line.
So this review of the RSC's latest production comes with a health warning attached -- I didn't see the whole play. But I think I saw enough to get a reasonable impression. Rhona Munro is best known as the author of Iron, a play about a woman in prison for murder, which hugely impressed me when I saw it at the Traverse in Edinburgh a decade or so ago. Unfortunately, Little Eagles by comparison never really engaged me.
Perhaps I should stay away from other people's plays about the Soviet Union, having written one myself. Maybe my judgment on a play about the Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev era is always going to be coloured too much by my own experience of having lived there, and by my irritation at tiny irrelevant details. So that's another health warning -- but I fear some of the play's flaws will be apparent to the wider theatre-going public, not just to me.
This is primarily the story of Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov (Darrell d'Silva), the man who headed the Soviet space programme and gave Moscow an astonishing series of firsts -- the first orbital satellite, the first man in space, the first woman in space, the first space walk. Later the Americans, stunned by these successes, used their vast technical superiority and resources to get the first man on the moon. On one level this is a competently written bio-drama about a man whose very existence was a state secret until after his death. But what's it really about? I left the theatre unable to answer that question. There's a lot of superficial conflict and argument on stage, but no grander theme that I could detect. And the conflict is mostly external, not internal.
As a plausible reworking of a real Russian story involving real people, the play gets some things right and others wrong. Yes, the uniforms are mostly right, and the frantic vodka-drinking looks familiar. But Munro has no feel for the warp and weft of Soviet life, for the bureaucratic language machine, or for the way Russians interact with each other and play power games with words. In this play people say pretty much what they think all the time, whereas the Soviet Union was a place where this rarely happened. It was a land of subtext and evasion. Nobody, but nobody, ever referred to Stalin as 'Uncle Joe' in the Soviet Union, even after his fall from grace.
Of course, I acknowledge we don't look to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar for a primer on real Roman politics or to Hamlet for a guide to how the Danish monarchy may have behaved, so an absence of realistic accuracy may be a liberating advantage for a writer telling a story. But here neither the story nor the characters break out of the historical framework to take on a life of their own. Huge historical events like the 1964 overthrow of Khrushchev should be a gift to a dramatist, but here the moment of his downfall (an invented scene) is just banal. The Cuban missile crisis arrives on stage but the play shifts elsewhere before it is resolved. And while the play dwells on tragic fate of Yuri Gagarin, turned from a pilot into a celebrity by becoming the first man in space, his death in a plane crash doesn't feature. The bigger political canvas just doesn't come to life in the way it should. There's a lot of colourful cursing, and there's tension between Korolyov's desire to explore space for its own sake and the defence priorities of his bosses, but I never felt the presence of a real moral argument. Although the triumphs of the Soviet space programme were on paper a huge success for the communist system, the perception of earth from space as a single tiny planet inhabited by all of us deeply undermined the orthodox Marxist-Leninist concept of a world in which class divisions were paramount. In that sense, space exploration helped drive a nail in the coffin of the system which invested in it so heavily as a way of validating itself. But these paradoxes go unexplored.
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