The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare.
The RSC isn’t limited to Shakespeare. It’s also one of the richest and most prolific fringe operations in the country. ‘We have between 30 and 40 writers working on plays for us at any one time.’ Golly. Some Stratford bigwig wants to tell the tale of the Russian space programme so a Casualty writer, Rona Munro, has been hired to knock out a script. The programme note is an act of contrition. ‘I have had to take some glaring liberties with time and space and imagined events,’ Munro confesses. A strange approach to scientific history. ‘I ask forgiveness of the dead,’ she goes on, ‘and the indulgence of the living, some of whom have been fictionalised.’ OK, love. Let’s see the play.
We open in a gulag in 1938 where physics genius Sergei Korolyov has been sentenced to death.
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