TheatreguideLondon
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The TheatreguideLondon Review
Constellations
Royal Court Theatre January-February 2012
One of the characters in Nick Payne's short two-hander is (or may be) a physicist fascinated by string theory and its implication that there may be an infinite number of parallel universes in which every alternative to our reality exists.
Payne's play is a clever rumination on that possibility, nicely executed in Michael Longhurst's production. But its limitation is that it is not much more than clever.
Payne tells a simple boy-meets-girl story, but shows us along the way some of the directions it might have taken in alternate realities. So the first scene shows them meeting in a way that is a dead end, then hiccups and begins again with a small variation, then again and again until it finds a universe in which their relationship can move forward.
And so on into several versions of a second scene, and a third, and all that follow, each time letting us see what might have happened (or is happening in some other reality) before choosing one option and moving on.
All this is punctuated by one key scene that is repeated almost word-for-word six times through the play, giving the sense of spiralling in toward unpleasant and inescapable facts.
The play runs a bit over an hour, but if you were to cut away all the repetitions, there'd probably be about twenty minutes of plot. Of course you'd also lose the point of the play, which is that for every event, decision or word in our lives there are all the imaginable alternatives that actually exist out there somewhere.
(Payne argues that this should reassure us, but I would think that someone living an unhappy life would not be too comforted by the thought that another version of himself is being a lot happier.)
There is much to admire in the cleverness of Payne's concept and the entertaining way he presents it, but there's not much to involve you emotionally. The story and the characters are banal rom-com stuff, and the admirable work of Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall in differentiating among several variations on their characters, and of director Michael Longhurst in always keeping clear what's going on, can't make us care much about them or it.
Constellations never gets beyond a 'See how clever I am' display by the playwright, and your appreciation of that cleverness, along with the attractive performances, are the play's major attractions.
Gerald Berkowitz
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Review - Constellations - Royal Court Theatre 2012
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