It appears that space is still the final frontier for stage drama. Rona Munro's play - which launches the RSC's season of new writing at the Hampstead and marks the 50th anniversary of Yuri Gagarin's first manned orbit of earth - catalogues the stunning achievements of the unsung chief engineer, Sergei Korolyov (played here by the burly Darrell D'Silva), who set up the Soviet space programme on a shoestring.
In three uninspired hours, Roxana Silbert's production imparts much information about the political pressures under which former gulag inmate Korolyov worked. But there is no sense that writer and director are actually excited by the subject of space travel and so Little Eagles, the name by which the diminutive cosmonauts were known, remains decidedly earthbound.
