David Greig's The Cosmonaut's Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union is currently being performed at the O'Reilly Theatre, Keble College (entrance on Blackhall Road) by the Oxford Theatre Guild. It is an amateur production, and if ever proof were needed that "amateur" does not mean "sloppy", this is it. The play is strongly performed, tightly directed and efficiently stage-managed. Nothing about the production seems anything but entirely professional.

The play opens with the eponymous Cosmonaut and his companion, trapped in their space station as they have been for the past twelve years. All of the scenes involving the Cosmonauts are played on video, projected onto the back of the stage. This provides a strong sense of otherness to their interludes - a feeling of isolation which underlies the entire production. Although these two men are miles from earth, although they have no means of communicating with any other living souls, they are at the centre of a web of relationships that binds the various threads of the play together.

The Cosmonaut's Last Message is a complex play - deceptively so in many ways. It runs to about two and a half hours, including interval, but it seems longer. This is not to suggest that it drags in any way, but merely that it conveys an awful lot in quite a short space of time. There are something in the region of forty distinct scenes in the play, spread over fifteen different locations, a potentially risky decision, since there's a strong possibility of more time being spent on scene changes than actual scenes. Fortunately, this problem is circumvented with tight direction and the use of video.

By the same token, the cast consists of less than a dozen characters, and every one is vitally important. Even the various barmen, who show up in different locales throughout the play (all played by Bill Moulford, and credited together as "Proprietors") manage to be distinctive.

All of the cast are well suited to their roles. Michael Dacre and Chris Edwards are convincing as the cosmonauts, and Grace Mountain gives a good performance as Nastasja, daughter to one of the stranded spacemen. James Reilly is also worthy of note as the obnoxious but ultimately insecure Eric. It is interesting to note, however, that the casting in the play is not precisely as Greig intended. For example, Greig instructs that Vivienne, the respectable civil servant's wife be played by the same actress as Sylvia, Natasja's world-weary confidante. While Helen Taylor and Lynette Peterson both acquit themselves admirably in their respective roles, I could not help but feel that the originally intended casting would have been more effective. In particular, the doubled casting places
a certain ambiguity on the delivery of the last line, which I feel would have made for a stronger ending.

All in all, then, The Cosmonaut's Last Message is a strong production of a decent play. It's well cast and well produced. It's well worth seeing. It would probably also be well worth seeing a production with the original doubled casting.

Daniel Hemmens, 02.11.04