The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union

Picture yourself floating in a forgotten space capsule orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth, unable to make contact, tormented by memories of loves lost, and running out of time in every sense of the phrase. This is the claustrophobic world of Casimir and Oleg, the two Soviet cosmonauts in David Greig’s play The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, due to be staged by the Oxford Theatre Guild at the O’Reilly Theatre, Keble College in the first week of November.

In what promises to be an innovative production of this complex, multi-stranded play, director Colin Macnee has chosen to combine filmed scenes and special effects with the live performance. One strand of the play follows Casimir and Oleg aboard their forgotten Soviet space capsule the Harmony 114. These scenes will be filmed in advance and shown on screen while the rest of the play is performed on stage. An original score and audio soundscapes have been created for the production by local composer Bill Moulford.

This is the first time that the Oxford Theatre Guild has embarked on such a multimedia production. Colin took this approach for a mixture of conceptual and pragmatic reasons.

He explains: "This is a play with about forty scenes set in a wide variety of locations, and staging that in a fairly small theatre is a major challenge. Filming the cosmonaut scenes was one step towards meeting that challenge as it means that, while they are playing, the stage management team can be changing the stage for the next scene.

"But I would not have done it if I didn’t think it would work conceptually. I think it works very well because the cosmonauts are in a different kind of world, a different space from the characters on earth. They are in space but out of time, meaning both that they stand outside the normal flow of time and that their time is up"

Aboard the Harmony 114, Casimir is tormented by the fading memory of his daughter, Nastasja, and Oleg is haunted by the memory of one idyllic weekend with a woman with whom he subsequently lost contact. As the cosmonauts drift aimlessly in orbit, the play follows a loosely connected group of people dispersed across Europe. Nastasja has washed up in the seedy nightclubs of Soho where she is having an affair with Keith, a middle-aged civil servant in a stale marriage. When Keith fakes suicide and disappears, his wife Vivienne sets out in search of answers. In France, she finds Bernard, a retired space scientist who is tracking the space module and trying to make contact. Nastasja and her friend Sylvia are taken to Oslo by Eric, an official of the World Bank whom Keith has met by chance at Heathrow.

David Greig first came to prominence during the 1990s and is one of the most talented of a new generation of Scottish playwrights. A prolific writer, his latest work, The American Pilot, will be performed at The Other Place at Stratford as part of the RSC’s 2005 season. Colin believes that this is the first time The Cosmonaut’s Last Message has been performed in Oxford.

Colin is passionate about David Greig’s work: "When I was reading it, I felt a tightness in my chest which I’ve felt only occasionally on reading a script. He’s an intelligent writer; he combines the intimate with the epic, the timeless with the modern, a global vision with an acute sense of place. I found the story very affecting both at an intimate human level and in terms a world view of globalisation and the break up of Eastern Europe.

"At one level, the play’s many short scenes constitute a kind of tone poem. Throughout it, on Earth and in whatever space the cosmonauts find themselves, runs a yearning for love, for profound communication and for the repair of broken emotional bonds – a yearning which cannot or will not be expressed until no other hope is left.

"Greig does have a gift for acerbic humour. Although he deploys it sparingly in this play, some scenes have an implicit vein of comedy running through them."