The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union: “All This Fucking Beautiful Stuff”

Abstract

The chapter initially unveils the intricacies of The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union’s (Ustinov Studio, 1999) intriguing title by way of introduction. Unpacking the two conceits this play departs from (it had to bounce from space to Earth like a satellite signal and include all the places the playwright had been to recently), whereby both a dialectic between above and below and a sense of across emerge (verticality and horizontality), the chapter argues that while the play conveys this perpendicular axis, it also drills holes in its twofold rigid dialectical structure. The play gradually undoes its inbuilt spatial patterns in order to suggest the need for more interconnected ways of “being-with” (Nancy), which culminates in the space module’s explosion. The chapter concludes that apparently distinct spatial realms are collapsed “globally” into one, providing a poetic glimpse of “All this fucking beautiful stuff”.

David Greig, Plays 1: Europe, The Architect, The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union (London: Methuen, 2002), 295.