ONE SMALL STEP. To 30 August.
Oxford.
ONE SMALL STEP
by David Hastings.
Burton Taylor Theatre To 30 August 2008.
Runs 1hr No interval.
Review: Timothy Ramsden 29 August.
Ingenious, fast-paced space race brought to you from a room in someone’s house.
Two keen, fresh-faced young men recount David Hastings’ history of the 12-year progress from Russia’s first Sputnik to America’s 1969 moon landing. Household objects help tell the story, with rockets constructed from cardboard boxes, or plastic buckets standing in for space helmets and docking space vehicles, suggesting the private accumulation of imaginative amateurs. There’s also an impressive slide collection, with a suitable sense of discovery and awe at the first sighting of earth from space.
The childlike enthusiasm’s fitting; there’s a childish element to the Cold War space rivalry, America responding fearfully when Russia launched a satellite, then put a dog in space (American response: we no Laika). Internal grumblings when America cut its space budget are reflected in one of the cast’s sulky refusal to play.
Intriguingly it was charismatic President Kennedy who set the timetable arbitratily hurtling America to the moon before the sixties were out. His less magnetic successor, Lyndon Johnson, launched the investigation uncovering NASA’s multiple mistakes, insisting on unmanned flights until they were sorted, thereby probably saving many astronauts’ lives.
President Eisenhower, the golf-loving former World War II general, had established NASA (here, having even its name carved painfully as an afterthought: National - Aeronautics – and Space - - Administration), without any notion of who would run it. The answer came, typically enough, in the form of a TV scientist.
Toby Hulse’s production maintains a pace suggesting both childlike enthusiasm and hectic political one-upmanship. Yet comic hats for Russians, and the stereotypical Americans don’t glide over both sides’ unpublicised tragedies on the way to the moon, though the performance style avoids bogging such moments down in factitious sentimentality.
When the two Americans finally reach the lunar surface, they’re up against centuries of lore about its dust and the possibility of submerging. Maybe it’s understandable Captain Neil Armstrong should muff his historic line, though his companion Buzz Aldrin seems more one for a striking phrase – his “Desolate immensity” beating Armstrong’s “Ain’t that something?” when describing the moon-scene.
And, yes, this mix of the mundane and spectacular, of comic method with scientific scope, really is something.
Cast: Robin Hemmings, Oliver Hollis.
Director: Toby Hulse.
Designer: Tim Boyd.
One Small Step may be making giant leaps on the tour circuit in 20009 – watch this space.
2008-09-02 12:31:18