The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman he Onced Loved in the Former Soviet Union

 

With “The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union“ by Scottish born David Greig, the English Drama Group Münster once again deals with a masterpiece of contemporary British drama.

Cosmonauts Oleg and Casimir take centre stage in this play. After the end of the Cold War they were forgotten in Space and are still trying in vain to make contact with earth. Parallel to this, several seemingly unconnected plot lines unfold below: We meet Casimir’s daughter Nastasja. She lives in London now and works there as a dancer in a striptease club. Her personal live is determined by her dependency on men. She has an affair with the much older, bland civil servant Keith, who can’t bring himself to end his unhappy marriage with Vivienne. One night Keith drives to the beach and disappears into the sea. The search for him leads Vivienne to southern France and to UFO researcher Bernard, while Nastasja meets Erik, a rich control freak who takes her and her obscure friend and fellow table dancer Sylvia to Oslo. Sitting on the roof of her flat there, she sees a flash of light in the sky as Oleg blows up the space craft…

The play, inspired by a true story that happened on the MIR space station, is an allegory on human interaction in live and the inability to communicate while living in a time of abundant communication technology. In 42 poetic, grotesque, funny and touching scenes, the characters meet again and again, united and yet years apart.