Constellations 1 and 2

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 3 July 2021

Michael Longhurst revives Nick Payne's play, this time on behalf of the Donmar Warehouse where he is now artistic director, though in a West End theatre since the Donmar itself is currently undergoing a major renovation.

The play is well suited to the current situation in terms of its technical requirements, in that there are only two actors involved, with a small technical team to back them up; also, at only 70 minutes in length, it places a fairly minimal threat in terms of gathering strangers in an interior space for a prolonged period. Many of the seats in the theatre are in any case unoccupied due to current government restrictions.

The beguiling investigation of memory, its significance and fickleness, is further emphaised in this revival by the decision to use four separate casts to play the protagonists. On this occasion I saw Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in the afternoon performance, and Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in the evening performance.

Visually the production is the same as I recall seeing in 2015 (see my review of 24 June 2015 for my account of the play itself and the way it challenges the audience's expectation of following a straightforward narrative). The interest here, therefore, resides in watching two completely different pairs of people interpret the play on the same day: an older couple followed by a younger couple. Inevitably one assumes that the opening scenes in which Ronnie and Marianne tentatively get to know one another are played out with a different hinterland in each case: the nerves of older people making a connection which may or may not be comfortable being fraught, one supposes, with past possibly disappointing experience, whereas the nerves of the younger pair may only arise from inexperience. These contrasting possibilities cast very different lights on what follows.

I felt that there was a drawback with Zoe Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. They are both distinguished actors, but their styles are also very distinctive, and in a play with so little material pointers - a stage full of balloons, for exanple, rather than any representation of a recognisable space - it is hard to distance onself from the knowledge of who the actors are. Their personal mannerisms are simply too prominent at times. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah are not (yet) so well known, though Sheila Atim has an immensely striking physical presence. It seemed to me that the younger pair had an easier time with establishing the flirtatiousness of the two characters, whereas with the older actors the same scenes came across more as social comedy or world-weariness. Consequently I found the second performance more convincing.

The play revels in repeating scenes with slight variations of dialogue, creating multiple ways of understanding what might be happening or what is going unsaid. It is even more fascinating to watch two such different performances in quick succession, allowing even more resonances to reverberate in the mind.