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

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Play Opened 12 April 2005, Closed 21 May 2005

Donmar Warehouse Earlham Street, London

"Realistic, comic, fantastic and mystical" The London Evening Standard

Two forgotten Soviet cosmonauts orbit a world that cannot hear them. A Scottish civil servant, in the throes of a midlife crisis, takes a brave step into the unknown. A Norwegian peace negotiator scours the world to retrieve the tape of his Russian girlfriend's breath as she stands gazing at the stars and dreaming of her childhood back home. An Edinburgh speech therapist arrives in Provence searching for clues to her husband's whereabouts. Instead, she finds Bernard a UFO researcher who very probably knows all the answers. But they don't speak the same language, so they drink red wine and dance under the stars.

Lyrical, soulful and darkly funny, The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union by David Greig explores our inability to communicate, our desperate need to connect and the incessant search for harmony and peace within us all.

"Maybe the writer David Greig underlines once too often that failing communications constitute the key theme... Some improbable plot developments arise as well. However, cavils aside and assuming you survive the title, The Cosmonaut's Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union is a beautifully written play - in fact, a minor classic. It is quietly probing while keeping the characters' motivations ultimately unknowable... The dialogue can be startlingly comical as well, with veins of satire surfacing in exchanges that are also threatening or deeply pained. Director Tim Supple's fine revival is haunting." Independent on Sunday

"Superb... terrific performances" The Daily Telegraph

"It's impressively performed by actors required to change from pole dancers to police persons at the flick of a thigh. But though it swims elegantly to the music of the spheres, its point is repetitive. It's a list of the ways people fail to get through to one another: some have strokes, some have the wrong partners, some get lost in space and some - well, they just can't get good radio reception." The Observer

"David Greig's play is so complex, you'd think it was haphazard: it might fall apart like a lost spaceship. You'd be wrong: it's like a poem where images and ideas echo each other... The play is about escape and abandonment, absence and isolation, need and freedom, the space between lives and worlds. Take me in. Let me out. Brid Brennan and Michael Pennington lead a first-rate cast who work with delicacy and vigour." The Sunday Times

"The play brilliantly contrasts the petty, humdrum, disjointed lives of the people whom the cosmonauts left behind and makes some intelligent points about our unfortunate habit of involving ourselves in conflicts, our self-general destructiveness, our inability to see things in perspective and our all-too-frequent failure to communicate." The Sunay Telegraph