THEATRE REVIEW:
THE COSMONAUT'S LAST MESSAGE TO THE WOMAN HE ONCE LOVED IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION
23 APR/11


JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 2 out of 5

TORONTO - While great theatre is timeless, a good play — even an adequate one — can usually find a niche worth inhabiting for a short time. One suspects the niche for David Greig’s at-best-adequate THE COSMONAUT'S LAST MESSAGE TO THE WOMAN HE ONCED LOVED IN THE FORMER SOVIET UNION came with a best-before-date near the end of the last century, around the time it was written.


It was a time of political flux, for not only was a new millennium upon us and a new world order, but a whole raft for new technology as well — all of it threatened by a bug called Y2K. That tumult is reflected, albeit in less-than-compelling fashion, in Greig’s tale of disconnected lives. After a few stagings in Great Britain, THE COSMONAUT'S LAST MESSAGE… has made its way to Canada, via Canadian Stage, where artistic and general director Matthew Jocelyn gave the work a Canadian première Thursday in the Bluma Appel Theatre.


As the title implies, Greig’s stageplay centres around Oleg, a Russian cosmonaut trying to send a final message to a woman with whom he had once shared a powerful physical and emotional connection. Oleg (played by Tony Nappo) is clearly inspired by Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut aboard the Mir Space Station when the Soviet Union fell who found himself stranded for 300 days while his countrymen sorted out how to bring him back to earth. Oleg’s fate is worse, however, for he has been in orbit for 12 years, and although he has company — fellow cosmonaut Casimir (Tom Barnett) — Casimir loathes Oleg and wants to kill him.


And while the two of them orbit, trying to establish and maintain a connection (however tenuous) with their lives on earth, Greig introduces a veritable host of other characters, all struggling to connect in their way as well. There’s a Scottish civil servant (David Jansen) and his speech therapist wife (Fiona Byrne), a Norwegian diplomat (Raoul Bhaneja) and a Russian prostitute that may or may not be Casimir’s daughter (Sarah Wilson).


They share an earthbound orbit with a further cast of characters with whom they have occasional contact but no connection — a pregnant Scottish cop (Wilson), a French scientist (Jansen), a battle-scarred dominatrix (Byrne), several bartenders (all played by Bhaneja) and a patient with severe speech impediment (Barnett).


Written in a highly cinematic and pointlessly profane form, it is a work that demands both scope and intimacy, and while the Bluma stage certainly offers director Jennifer Tarver and designer Julie Fox (set and costumes) the breadth required, it comes up dangerously short on the kind of intimacy that might induce an audience to care a fig about any of them, or the loneliness that plagues them.


And under Tarver’s direction, much of that scope is wasted in an electronic-age story that moves at a glacial pace, which affords plenty of time to savour the production’s flaws. While one might overlook the fact that the revolve on the Bluma stage has rarely been used to such cheesy effect, or that dialect designer and coach Eric Armstrong’s contributions are at best haphazard, it is impossible to ignore the fact that Tarver has squandered most of the talent at her disposal.


One can’t quibble with the showcase she gives designers Robert Thomson (lighting) and Jeremy Mimnagh (projections), but talented players such as Byrne, Nappo, Bhaneja and Jansen seem to be mired at the bottom of their range. Wilson seems to think she’s been cast opposite James Bond. One suspects the Cosmonaut’s Last Message was probably along the lines of “Is this over yet?”