Little Eagles tells the extraordinary story of Sergei Korolyov, Chief Designer and unsung hero of the Soviet space programme. Under the leadership of this remarkable man, the USSR trounced the Americans in the space race throughout the 50s and 60s, achieving a series of firsts, including the first intercontinental ballistic missile, the first satellite, the first animal in space, the first human in space and the first unmanned Moon landing.

Rona Munro’s new play, Little Eagles, illuminates the tortured life and work of this brilliant scientist and complex man. Torn from his family in the brutal Stalinist purges of the 1930s and sent to the gulag, he was subsequently rehabilitated in order to take sole charge of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious scientific research programme.

Little Eagles reveals how Korolyov struggled to meet the military demands of his ruthless political masters, Krushchev and Brezhnev, while devoting as much time as possible to the space programme. And it shows how he was forced to risk the lives of the pilots, his beloved ‘little eagles’, who included Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, whose achievement amazed and delighted the world.