Theatreguide.London
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The Theatreguide.London Review
Little Eagles
Royal Shakespeare Company at Hampstead Theatre
Spring 2011
The RSC's
brief season of new plays opens with Rona Munro's docudrama, which tells
the story of the all-but-unknown Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, the engineer
who almost single-handedly designed and pushed through the Soviet space
program, from Sputnik through Gagarin and beyond.
It makes for a fascinating dramatised history lesson, but whether
there's an actual play here is less certain.
Plucked from a gulag prison camp after running afoul of one of Stalin's
periodic purges, Korolyov was paroled to help build long-range missiles,
but he managed to charm Khrushchev into diverting the project from
armaments to space travel. (One result, if Munro's facts are correct, is
that the USSR had far, far fewer intercontinental missiles than the USA
always believed.)
Korolyov ran afoul of the more sceptical Brezhnev just as the Americans
were catching up in the space race, and the engineer died in even
greater obscurity than that in which he had lived.
All this is fascinating, and Munro tells the story well. Her attempt to
flesh it out into real drama is built mainly on imagining a personality
for Korolyov, but she doesn't really get much further than making him a
single-minded and demanding workaholic.
Munro invents two characters, a female doctor who knew Korolyov in the
gulag and improbably reappears as the cosmonauts' medical director, and
the ghost of a fellow gulag prisoner.
Both serve in a way as the engineer's conscience, the one reminding him
of the human costs of his obsession, the other reinforcing his
commitment to it. But since Munro's Korolyov never wavers or is
particularly affected by either of them, they don't actually have much
real dramatic function or tell us much about him.
Darrell D'Silva effectively captures the man's complete dedication and
self-confidence, allowing the suggestion that there is something darker
or neurotic in his inability to stop working. Noma Dumezweni provides a
sharp-edged scepticism as the doctor, and Greg Hicks brings his
formidable presence and authority to the double roles of the ghost and a
suspicious military overseer.
Dyfan Dwyfor makes a charmingly boyish Yuri Gagarin, John Mackay has
strong moments as a jealous competing engineer, and Brian Doherty steals
his scenes as a half-comic Khrushchev.
Director Roxana Silbert keeps things flowing smoothly, though she can't
fully disguise the sense that there's more docu- than -drama here.
Gerald
Berkowitz
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