Constellations

by Nick Payne

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 24 June 2015

The play is directed by Michael Longhurst and stars Joe Armstrong and Louie Brealey. Having been a success at the Royal Court and on Broadway (with a different cast in each place), it is now touring before a brief West End revival.

The stage is littered with dozens of balloons, with changing patterns of light on them prior to the start of the performance. Many are raised at the beginning to create the acting space, and many are revealed to be globes which can be lit from within.

The play proceeds by abrupt snippets of encounters between Ronnie and Marianne, each terminated by a brief blackout or a burst of light, followed by a shift in the pattern of lights. Many of these scenes use almost identical words inflected with different emotion, or else with subtle shifts of vocabulary and emphasis which change the whole tenor of the scene. In some cases the speaking roles are reversed - thus Marianne may be initiating a conversation for a while, then suddenly Ronnie is starting the encounter instead. (The whole piece must be a nightmare to learn.)

The result is that a play which lasts only 70 minutes covers an enormous spectrum of interactions, and it charts a volatile relationship with a surprising depth and intensity. The refracted shards of the encounters remind us that situations may be played out in a number of ways - or that they may look irreconcilably different to the different protagonists - or that their significance may be differently interpreted as they become memories within a relationship rather than the cutting edge of the present moment. At the same time, we in the audience instinctively try to fill in background details to account for the snippets we are being shown. There is also a temptation to try to sort out which of the multiple possibilities represents the 'real' course of events, though this is probably a reflex created by our desire to impose a narrative on the passage of time. It is fairly clear from references to quantum mechanics and the nature of time that the notion of there being a 'real' narrative is not to be encouraged.

The two actors are exemplary in navigating the many different moods of their encounters, often switching on and off the most intense emotions in mere seconds, where a more conventionally constructed play might give them minutes to build and develop the situation. There is only the slightest distraction from the play itself in realising the sheer technical skill involved in portraying a relationship in this demanding style; most of the time the artifice is expertly hidden.