91É«ÇéƬ

FROM space, Earth looks like a blue ball. That’s because the oceans reflect the sky. Or so says Roger, an arrogant astrophysicist in The Blue Ball, a play that opened in London last week at the Royal National Theatre. Roger may be rude and disagreeable, but at least he’s interesting, which is more than can be said for the astronauts and space officials who share the stage. Author Paul Godfrey spent months in the American and Russian space centres in Houston and Moscow researching a play that he hoped would explain what drives us to explore space. The fact that he’s resorted to portraying himself as the play’s only sympathetic character emphasises the trouble he had in persuading the people he met to say interesting things. Critics have been savage, which is a pity. The play offers some chuckles at NASA’s expense, a few neat one-liners from media-hardened space explorers, and anecdotes that, whether true or false, highlight an extraordinary dichotomy between the spiritual intrigues of scientific investigation and the practical compromises of technological development.