Brighton Year-Round 2024
Constellations
New Venture Theatre, Brighton
Genre: Contemporary, Drama, Short Plays, Theatre
Venue: New Venture Theatre Upstairs
Festival: Brighton Year-Round
Low Down
There’s a point early on in this enchanting, heartbreaking play when you realize it’ll end in tears. Or perhaps, or joyful news with a Bolognese. Or couple beekeeper Roland and Marianne/Mary the astrophysicist, never meet. Directed by Mary Allen, Nick Payne’s 2012 Royal Court hit Constellations runs at the New Venture Theatre Upstairs till June 22nd.
This superb revival suggests Constellations will certainly travel for a long time.
Directed by Mary Allen, Stage Manager David Turton, ASM Ayshen Irfan
Set Design John Everett, Lighting Design & Rigging Strat Mastoris, Sound Design & Operation Philip Castle
Set Construction John Everett, George Walter, Simon Glazier, Steve Hutton, Sam Deardon, Christine Hauschild, Tomasz Baraniecki,
Set Painting John Everett & Sam Deardon, Lighting Operation Will Neal
Poster & Programme Tamsin Mastoris, Publicity Photography Strat Mastoris, Publicity & Marketing Robert Dunkley, Greg Donaldson, Kate Alderton, Media, Health and Safety Ian Black.
With many thanks to Katie Brownings and as always Box Office FOH and Volunteers
Till June 22nd
Review
There’s a point early on in this enchanting, heartbreaking play when you realize it’ll end in tears. Or perhaps, or joyful news with a Bolognese. Or couple beekeeper Roland and Marianne/Mary the astrophysicist, never meet. Directed by Mary Allen, Nick Payne’s 2012 Royal Court hit Constellations runs at the New Venture Theatre Upstairs till June 22nd.
Hugh Everett’s many-worlds theory, in which an infinitesimal branching off of lives from just one moment multiplies dizzyingly, is one jumping-off. Boy with honeybees meets stargazing girl with laptop: except she’s really gazing, taking down the numbers and talks of String. Theory.
It’s as if Frayn’s Copenhagen, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle put to dramatic options, is here multiplied through a bee’s eye. Payne however teases this, anticipates moments in the sequence way before time, or way after.
The first scene shows this with a sharp tender shock, then pulls back to a first encounter. These jumps wrench more than Everett’s physics – which theatre owns a knack of tidying and outwitting into meaning.
In this fleet-footed revival (there is dance) Mary Allen reminds us why this was such a hit in 2012, transferring to the Duke of York’s, toured to acclaim in 2015 and was revived at the Donmar in 2021 with four different casts. Indeed that’s where Payne has found his theatrical home.
Kate Alderton sparks around a chalk-scribbled space like a slowly errant electron. Greg Donaldson’s faintly drone-ish kindness centres her fracturing warmth, with her passion for his honey.
Since a honeycomb of possibles are explored, the play amplifies beyond core narrative: the couple could have developed differently as people; it becomes frantically universal. It’s a not-so-simple chat-up of brainy girl propositioning beefy boy where her astro-spiel (if you could lick your elbow you’d live forever) is hilariously stopped at first by a knowing, blunt: “I’m in a relationship.”
Light-dims accustom one to the trajectory: Marianne’s biology, each revealing an affair (usually Marianne), breaking up, meeting by chance at a dance-class with Marianne’s monumental rekindle-chat-up: “Comfortable trousers… last time I got home my crotch was like a fucking furnace/inferno/sauna/hothouse.” Each variant elicits a different response.
Then the scripted marriage-proposal playing on audience groans at the thought of it yet again. Donaldson’s repeat-pull-script (and once where the script’s mislaid) takes this so far down to screaming-point you wish the universe would hurry up and atomise him into a bit of quantum.
Donaldson’s bluff, shrewdly empathic Roland plays subtle calibrations against Alderton’s wryly bendy Marianne who runs a gallimaufry of selves: same person, with a glitch of difference. More empathic, more abrupt, far more/less amorous, excruciatingly ambivalent (often), tired and in pain; and less, or more tolerant.
With Alderton, this Marianne’s always emotionally one step ahead of Roland’s game attempts to understand physics, metaphor, love or the world of maybe. Donaldson’s watchful reactions move out of caring bloke to occasional furious selves. His reactions semaphore more quickly than some a world of possible Rolands. Fright, even violence flash across like reading worlds by lightning – or ones never there.
Both actors graduated at LAMDA in the same year: their previously working together just shows. Sheer chemistry and trust means even an intimacy director’s not needed beyond Allen herself, who brings this production in at a pacy 70 minutes. Even though the pauses seep in.
John Everett’s black chalkboard set scumbled over with lines , mimics tracks of subatomic particles produced by CERN sensors, the Large Hadron Collider. They twist in strong magnetic fields, emitting info on mass and charge: Marianne’s job. These bisect a broken-open blue honeycomb each side, where shades of blue bespeak deep-space bees. Stark poetry plays off wistful science.
Strat Mastoris’ lighting (operator Will Neal) not only flicks to black elegantly: there’s a poise of dimming to usher in other, tenebrous worlds. Not options, but emotions shifting in one scene as understanding brightens or extinguishes day. Philip Castle’s sound, a haunting three-note piano motif, touches love and elegy.
In a flash though we’re back with terminal options, early laid. Even here there are reprieves, alternatives. As Marianne tries to explain, there’s a physics where both of them will go on forever. This superb revival suggests Constellations will certainly travel for a long time.
