Little Eagles

Synopsis

Little Eagles tells the extraordinary story of Sergei Korolyov, chief designer and unsung hero of the Soviet space programme. Under the leadership of this remarkable man, the USSR trounced the Americans in the space race throughout the fifties and for much of the sixties, achieving a series of firsts, including the first intercontinental ballistic missile, first satellite, first animal in space, first human in space and Earth orbit and first unmanned Moon landing. Rona Munro’s gripping new play illuminates the tortured life and work of this brilliant scientist and complex man. Torn from his family in the brutal Stalinist purges of the 1930s and sent to the gulag, he was subsequently rehabilitated in order to take sole charge of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious scientific research programme. The play reveals how Korolyov struggled to meet the military demands of his ruthless political masters, Khrushchev and Brezhnev, whilst devoting as much time as possible to the space programme. And it shows how he was forced to risk the lives of the pilots, his beloved ‘little eagles’, who included Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, whose achievement amazed and delighted the world. Little Eagles presents a riveting portrait of a flawed genius and in doing so brings this fascinating and little-known story vividly to life.

Our Review:

Michael Coveney - 25 April 2011

Rona Munro’s Little Eagles opens the new RSC season at Hampstead Theatre: the first cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, went into orbit 50 years ago, but the play is firstly about the chief designer and “unsung hero” of the space race, Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov.

His engineering career is charted in a series of epic scenes from the gulags of Stalin to the design conferences, rocky meetings with an ebullient, coarse-grained President Kruschev, and the launch pad where Gagarin departs to touch the stars and defend the Motherland.

Roxana Silbert’s production is interesting, but not very exciting, laid out by designer Ti Green across a wide, grey stage dominated by a steel shard, part sculpture, part rocket. This area is flooded by a succession of apparatchiks, politicians (Leonid Brezhnev glowers at Kruschev’s shoulder), soldiers and engineers.

Try as he may, and for all his fleshiness as an actor, Darrell D'Silva cannot make us care very much about Korolyov...

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Latest User Review

David Baxter - 28 April 2011:

On paper Little Eagles seems like another of the 20th century Russian history plays which have been so impressive at the Royal National Theatre. Perhaps if Howard Davies had been directing Little eagles would have had more dramatic impact. The story is primarily concerned with Sergei Koralyov who was rescued from one of Stalin's gulags to almost single-handedly drive the Soviet cosmonaut programme. The play only really comes to life when confronting the realities of Communist rule: the deathcamps and Kruschev's posturing which makes clear that the space race was as much part of the Cold War as the Berlin Wall or the Cuban missile crisis. That is an appropriate analogy for Rona Munro's overlong play - at the end of the day neither amounted to very much....

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