CONSTELLATIONS. Directed by Alan Swerdlow, with Ashley Dowds and Janna Ramos-Violante. At the Theatre on the Bay, Tuesday to Friday at 8pm, and Saturday at 5pm and 8pm until October 11. STEYN DU TOIT reviews.
NICK PAYNE’S Constellations is a play that employs parallel timelines to track the different paths a potential relationship might take after a man and woman simultaneously fall for each other, and don’t fall for each other, at a braai one evening at a mutual friend’s house.
Making it’s South African debut under the direction of Alan Swerdlow, this West End hit draws on “quantum multiverse theory, love and honey” as it follows Marianne (Ramos-Violante), a quantum physicist, and Roland (Dowds), an urban beekeeper, to show us some of the infinite choices they’ll ever, and never, potentially have to make after this night.
Giddy attraction, awkward introductions, marriage proposals, honeymoon periods, ignored text messages, infidelity, career changes and terminal illness – like the slices of a loaf of bread pressed against each other, all of these possibilities are baked from the same substance and form part of the same relationship multiverse, yet remain clearly sui generis every time the action is (slightly) tweaked and repeated for each new cosmic possibility.
If this was a Hollywood blockbuster, we’d no doubt be seeing Marianne and Roland going off on increasingly preposterous adventures from time-travelling back to the dinosaurs to racing against the clock to save the Earth from some extraterrestrial disaster. But that is not what Payne’s witty, perceptive writing concerns itself with. Instead, it focuses its attention on several real lives lived as well as the inevitability that awaits at the end of all of them for Marianne and Roland (as well as for us).
Following last month’s astute staging of David Hare’s The Vertical Hour at the same venue, this is another offering for thinking theatregoers looking for an intellectual, contemporary theatrical offering. With Constellations you’re not only seeing one, but essentially several different plays running concurrently, each with its own dialogue, choreography, background music and distinct lighting cues.
It is a production that finds its tone and purpose so accurately that its genius may not be immediately detectable. Through repetition and the nuanced acting of it’s leads, the plot(s) unfold so naturally, and it is so absorbing, so seemingly effortless, that you almost have to stand back and pinch yourself before you see how good it really is.
Delivering their humorous lines, often undertoned by deeper emotions, it is remarkable how much Ramos-Violante ( Venus in Fur, Don’t Dress For Dinner) and Dowds ( Japes, The Mousetrap) manage to make the viewer care deeply for Marianne and Roland over the course of their steadfast, graded 80-minute performance. Through their characters, we are reminded of our own past, our own relationships and our own life’s choices.
While terms such as “string theory”, “elementary particles” and “quantum states” are thrown around frequently, be assured that you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to be able to keep up with the dialogue. All you need to be is a human being who has at one point or another felt an attraction to another human being, had to let go of someone you love or pondered what the point is of being given free will in a galaxy where, no matter what choices you make, one’s fate ultimately rests on chance and randomness.
“Listen to me,” Marianne says to Roland towards the end of the production, after becoming increasingly affected by a terminal illness slowly robbing her of her mind. In a deeply emotional scene leaving one overwhelmed by the sheer profoundness of it’s ideas and implications, she continues: “The basic laws of physics don’t have a past and a present. Time is irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules. It’s symmetrical. We have all the time we’ve always had. You’ll still have all our time”.
Heartfelt, intelligent and idiosyncratic: with its very short Cape Town season coming to an end this Saturday already, make sure that you find yourself transported to one of your parallel universes in which you end up going to see this stellar play.
l Tickets are R95 to R165. To book, see www.computicket.com or call 0861 915 8000.