Rona Munro’s new RSC play about the Russian space race zooms past a galaxy of historical characters. It opens in 1938 with Stalin making a brutally paranoid speech about the enemy within. By scene two he’s dead and the Soviet Union’s subsequent luminaries – dazzling, boozy Krushchev; taciturn Brezhnev – struggle to escape the deadly pull exerted by the death of their supernova boss.
It’s the lesser lights that Munro is drawn to, in a play whose scope gets smaller as it gets longer – the first 15 years whizz by in 15 minutes; the next 15 years take two and a half hours. The ‘Little Eagles’ of the title are jockey-sized cosmonauts who knock back the vodka, wait for a mission, and dream of flying MiGs again. They’re well drawn, these would-be-heroes in bureacratic freefall. But they’re not central. If anyone is in this elliptical portrait, it’s Sergei Korolyov, the unsung Soviet designer who pit his small band of convicts against multi-million-dollar armies of American scientists – and beat them into orbit.
It’s moving and ironic that an inspired individual was responsible for the scientific triumph of the dogmatically collectivist USSR (no wonder they kept him under wraps while Gagarin toured the world). Darrell D’Silva is grizzled, grimly passionate and singleminded as the engineer who gambles his own life at short odds but makes sure his fliers have a 50/50 chance. But the story of a man who goes from spitting out teeth on the frozen earth of a Siberian gulag to launching Sputnik, shouldn’t be
this boring.
Roxana Silbert’s attractive but thin production is lit up by a backdrop of stars. The dialogue is studded with similar artificial fire: nobody, not even the cheeky proletarian Gagarin, says ‘night’ when ‘sparkling dark’ will do.
But ‘Little Eagles’ is coruscating on thin ice. Despite fine acting, historical characters like Krushchev and Korolyov are remote. The fictionalised story fails to bring them closer. The doctor who saves Korolyov’s life in the gulag then comes back to haunt him is a flimsy, unreal adversary for Korolyov (and played monotonously by Noma Dumezweni). Others, like the rustics who witness Gagarin’s landing, are embarassingly bad (‘There’s something in the sky,’ says one peasant. ‘Is it a calf?’ asks the other).
‘Little Eagles’ captures the poetry of the space race in a constellation of little glimpses. But it’s too diffuse and too distant and, crucially, lacking in drama. It loops poetically around a fascinating subject. But it lacks the dynamic sense of purpose to fly you to the moon.