“In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.” Does this sound like pillow talk to you? If not, you have yet to be dazzled by Nick Payne’s two-hander Constellations. Some people are sexiest talking about their work. Roland keeps bees. Marianne, just quoted, studies cosmology in the Age of Hawking.
Economically staged by Michael Longhurst, Constellations claimed major prizes at premieres in London in 2012, with Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, and across the pond four years later, starring the Broadway newbies Jake Gyllenhall and Ruth Wilson. In June 2021, as London awakened from the pandemic, the Donmar Warehouse revived the production for a summer run at the intimate 690-seat Vaudeville, in the West End. But instead of one cast, there were four in rotation. Want to compare them? Be our guest! All were captured live on video, and the running time is a merciful 70 minutes.
Even so, Payne’s skeletal scenario might have been much shorter, which is very much to his point. “Let’s say that ours really is the only universe that exists,” Marianne tells Roland, who’s not really following. “There’s only one unique me and one unique you. If that were true, then there could only ever really be one choice.” But we do have choices, each of which opens the door to the next one. In Constellations, successive scenes start the same way only to skitter off this way and that way. Who’s hitting on whom? Who cheats? Who wants to move on? Who wants to roll the dice on one more drink? You can’t be sure.
To compare the various casts of the Donmar revival is to mimic in a spectatorial capacity the multidimensionality Payne has baked into his script. The Ugandan-British Sheila Atim, visionary sister-in-arms to Viola Davis in The Woman King, makes a riveting Marianne, angular and intense. It’s said that in a London Othello, Atim’s furious Emilia blew Mark Rylance’s diabolical Iago right out of the water. She goes easier on Ivanno Jeremiah’s Roland, but it’s still no contest.
Anna Maxwell Martin, a quietly heartfelt Esther Summerson in the 2005 BBC adaptation of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, tangos with the rumpled Chris O’Dowd from the BritBox comedy hit The IT Crowd. But it takes two, and the partnership is bland. Peter Capaldi, the 12th incarnation of the eternally returning Doctor Who shows up with Zoë Wanamaker in the autumn of her rich if perhaps short of historic stage career. But they’re late to the party in what is a distinctly young man’s play.
The two who really mix it up are the guy’s guy Russell Tovey as Roland and the mischievous, moody Omari Douglas as Manuel, a regendered Marianne. From flirtation to intimations of mortality, their depth of expression in the dialogue, tone, and body language seems unbounded. Their reflexes fire like lightning. They hold the stage with the natural ease of athletes or dancers, and flashes of physical aggression hint at a capacity for violence. You never know what they’ll do next—and then they do something else. Payne must be over the moon.
Constellations is available for streaming on the National Theatre At Home Web site
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
