During the 2001 winter, Belvoir staged a series of play readings on Monday nights in the Downstairs Theatre. We did this as a way of listening to wonderful new writing for the stage from Australia and overseas.

The discovery of Cosmonauts came from one such evening – it was a lyrical, soulful, terribly funny Rubik’s Cube of a play. It wove together the stories of a fraught Scottish husband and wife whose TV is on the blink, a Norwegian UN peace negotiator, a young Russian prostitute, a French UFO researcher, a pregnant police woman, and two forgotten Cosmonauts who orbited in the sad and silent space above this planet abandoned by God and Government. It worked with a poetic theatricality both bizarre and compelling, and was utterly of our time.