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Hampstead, London
Fifty years ago, Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the earth. But Rona Munro, in this epic play for the RSC, has shrewdly chosen to focus on the little-known figure of Sergei Korolyov: the rocket designer and truculent visionary responsible for the Soviet space programme. What Munro gives us is not just a tribute to an unsung hero but a fascinating study of Korolyov's growing conflict with the military and political machine.
Munro certainly packs a lot in. She starts by showing Korolyov as a prisoner in the gulag in 1938 and the lucky recipient of a female doctor's sole life-saving vaccine. The hero's engineering skills then transform him from an enemy of the people into a vital part of the Soviet rocket-development programme. Backed by Khrushchev, he is allowed to pursue his dream of space exploration as long as he also works on long-range missiles. So we see Korolyov and his team trumping the Americans by launching the first artificial satellite in 1957 and putting Gagarin into space in 1961. But a combination of the Cuban missile crisis, power shifts in the Soviet Union and his own failing health ensure that Korolyov, who died in 1966, is never able to capitalise on his triumphs.
It is a huge subject, but Munro, director Roxana Silbert and designer Ti Green admirably convey the excitement of scientific progress: the sight of a Sputnik model rotating like a silver ball and an aerially suspended Gagarin spinning through the cosmos is exhilarating. Munro is also good on the interaction between politics and science: the full-throated commitment of Khrushchev (played with pugnacious elan by Brian Doherty) to the space programme is succeeded by the caution of Brezhnev and the crabby criticism of the generals. But, while Munro makes history come alive, I wish she had found room to pursue Eric Hobsbawm's argument that it was precisely because they were given an unusual degree of freedom in the post-Stalin era that scientists became a source of dissidence.
In the end, this is as much narrative drama as a play of ideas. But it tells a gripping story, and Darrell D'Silva invests Korolyov with the right mixture of bullish obstinacy and patriarchal concern for the pilots he dubbed his "little eagles". Noma Dumezweni is also outstanding as the doctor who struggles to keep him alive through a series of heart attacks, and Greg Hicks doubles niftily as a carping general and a gulag victim who haunts Korolyov's imagination. Even if time has undermined Korolyov's claim that space exploration "would change what it means to be human", Munro's play recaptures the momentary excitement of that dream.
