WHAT IS the connection between a Russian tabledancer, a hapless nobody and an electric violin? For those still guessing, over the next two months all three will feature in productions that take their inspiration from space. London theatre is going for lift-off with Theatre O’s Astronaut, Laurie Anderson’s The End of the Moon, both at the Barbican, and David Greig’s play about cosmonauts at the Donmar Warehouse.

No specific season has been planned, but as Nasa prepares for a mission launch next month, British theatre audiences will be able to send their imaginations soaring beyond the stratosphere.

Robert Lepage demonstrated the power of space travel as a theatrical metaphor four years ago, when he brought his show Far Side of the Moon to the National Theatre. It wittily blended a story of sibling rivalry with flashbacks to the space race between the US and the Soviet Union. Most poignant, however, was the connection drawn between the loss of gravity in space and the disorientating feelings of grief the two brothers experienced after the death of their mother. In a haunting image, Lepage rolled slowly on the ground in front of a large tilted mirror, so that his reflection took off and floated free like an astronaut to Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

That theme of loss and yearning resonates through all three of these very different shows. Despite the massive advances in space exploration and the daunting challenges of operating outside Earth’s boundaries, it still seems that the most profound relationship we have with space occurs when we stare wistfully up at the stars. In medieval times it was widely believed that the Moon was a reflection of the world. Today’s theatre-makers seem to concur. In David Greig’s The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union, events in space certainly mirror the problems his characters are facing on Earth.

“The part of the play that came first was the title,” confesses Greig, who, despite boyhood ambitions of space travel, initially did not intend to write about cosmonauts. “I had written a fragment about the man who lives in Charles de Gaulle airport (Merhan Nasseri, subsequently made famous in the Steven Spielberg film The Terminal), and I imagined him going round and round in a circle like a cosmonaut orbiting the globe. Then I thought, rather than having a metaphorical cosmonaut I’d have a real one, so I wrote a scenario in which two men are on a space mission that gets forgotten.

“I wrote the play from the unconscious as much as possible, so it was only when I did my research that I discovered that this had really happened to a cosmonaut who was stranded on the Mir space station because of the collapse of the Soviet Union.”

The cosmonauts’ struggles to communicate, not only with Earth but also with each other, are echoed in Greig’s investigation of a series of interweaving relationships. There’s a married couple with nothing left to say to each other, a stroke victim with memories but little grasp of words, and a Russian table-dancer who’s the daughter of one of the cosmonauts.

“People say the play is about a failure in communication but I think it’s about the incredible way that people do communicate against the odds,” Greig says. “I also think it’s about the way that we constantly need to test the boundaries of human experience.”

The highly inventive physical company Theatre O has discovered a rather more claustrophobic metaphor in its drama about a failed astronaut. A living-room nobody is selected by the European Space Agency as part of an initiative to send an ordinary man to Mars. Its director, Joseph Alford, explains: “He’s at a point in his life where all he sees stretching before him is a daily routine that’s just killing him. He keeps looking to the outside for some kind of answer, and when he’s watching the television he keeps on stumbling on these advertisements for the European Space Agency.”

Alford became fascinated about the way that images of space travel lent themselves to his exploration of an unhappy domestic set-up. “All the problems of being locked together in a space capsule — boredom, irritation with each other, insomnia — are the same as the problems in this man’s family life. We also became interested in looking at gravity as a way of signifying importance. The less important you are, the less gravity acts upon you. As the show comes to its climax this family loses all of its weight.”

Bert Ulrich, a spokesman for Nasa, has seen a number of artistic responses to space exploration. Indeed since the 1960s there has been a Nasa art programme commissioning works by artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Annie Leibovitz and Andy Warhol. “Around 1999 to 2000 we were encouraged to reach out to other art forms, and we did a piece with the Kronos Quartet,” he says.

“We then created an artistic residency, offering $20,000 for a project lasting two years. Laurie Anderson (who created the music for Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon) seemed to be a natural for it.”

Certainly Anderson’s fascination with technology and art, combined with her broad scope as a conceptual artist, musician and performer, makes her particularly well suited to examining aspects of the American space programme. “It was a very strange gig,” she concedes, though she turned out to have more in common with Nasa researchers than she expected.

“It emerged that they didn’t really know what they were looking for. They had a hunch and then they had to work out the best way to develop that. It seemed to me that it was very similar to the way I was working for Nasa as an artist.”

The resulting show, punctuated by her compositions on the electric violin, combines stories from her own life with reflections on Nasa inventions such as the spacesuit equipped with built-in injections of adrenalin and morphine which could be adapted for military purposes.

It’s a critical as well as a philosophical piece, so does Anderson think that what’s happening at Nasa will con- tinue to win over the public imagination? “I think the major fascination will come back, through projects like trying to make Mars inhabitable,” she says. “JFK disguised space as a romantic frontier, which it’s obviously not, but for Americans space will always be connected to dreams about the future.”

• Astronaut opens tomorrow at the Barbican, EC2 (0845 1207550); The Cosmonaut’s Last Message . . . is at the Donmar, WC2 (0870 0606624) from Thursday; The End of the Moon is at the Barbican from May 18