FringeReview UK 2025

Heisenberg

Arcola Theatre, Studio 2

Genre: Adaptation, Contemporary, Drama, LGBTQ+ Theatre, Mainstream Theatre, Short Plays, Theatre

Venue: Arcola Theatre, Dalston

Festival: FringeReview UK

Low Down

Review

When Georgie, a 42-year-old woman (Faline England) suddenly walks up, and plants a kiss on the neck of 75-year-old Alex (Jenny Galloway) sitting on a St Pancras station bench, Alex might tell what direction she’s coming from; but not the velocity of that kiss, what it will do. Or maybe the other way round? What does Georgie want? We find over 90 minutes there is a direction, and it’s thousands of miles away. That’s the uncertainty Werner Heisenberg proposed. Simon Stephens’ 2015 Heisenberg is revived at the Arcola directed by Katharine Farmer till May 10^th.

As Georgie does this inaugurating a wonderfully off-kilter set of exchanges, Stevie Nicks’ ‘Edge of Seventeen’ blasts out: the surprise is that it’s Alex who might know it, with her vast knowledge of Rock’ n’ Roll to Grunge, string quartets to opera. Alex, Georgie finds, is a butcher who served in Suez listening to Gene Vincent. None of this is predictable. Farmer and her team have re-gendered Stephens’ slightly creaky cute-meet seduces much older man, surely an off-limits fantasy by now. Queering the play truly revives its possibilities.

Though with Stephens so precise about dates (these are unchanged, so think 2015) more care might also have been taken with Alex still having served in Suez! Textually there isn’t enough of the ‘radical reimagining’ claimed, merely pronoun swapping. It’s down to Farmer and choreographer Anna Alvarez, working with England and Galloway, to reclaim the energy. Happily they do and it opens up far more opportunity for nuance, equality, tenderness. 

“You must find me exhausting but captivating,” England declares with absolute confidence to guarded Alex after a while. It seems 90% of dialogue is Georgie’s, peregrine to Alex’s orbit, an electron to her neutron, wildly spiralling with giggly, nervous, self-correcting energy. Confiding and then admitting she’s lying, occasionally truthful, she wrong-foots and trips herself up. Offering to leave, she hovers instead till Alex acts.

England shocks out Georgie to her fingertips, sometimes rude, sometimes confiding: England is captivating, whirligigging Georgie’s own fate around in ellipses, her smile both warm but hinting teeth, her eyes almost an acetylene flare of purpose on occasion. Galloway earths everything with both laconic, dry ripostes and hesitant feints. She stills the room with every answer she gives. Alex is a drastically underwritten part, and Georgie’s nimbus of words hides a cloud of unknowing: as if Stephens thinks enough buzz will settle like a cloud chamber.

A slightly more hectoring encounter between them at Alex’s butcher’s shop follows. Some of this isn’t entirely believable (Stephens’ fault), and tension occasionally drops. The original played over 75 minutes, and this adds 15.

The finest moments are the stillest. After a whirlwind date, the two end up in bed, with more revealing, almost equal exchanges. Georgie’s baffled by the music. “Bach’s B minor Violin Sonata…. music doesn’t exists in the notes but in the space between the notes.” It’s these comments from Alex that tells us she’s far more attuned to uncertainty and the not-said than Georgie’s frantic word-swerving.

Nevertheless Georgie’s reading Alex’s 67 years of diaries (“50 words a day, no more no less” as Alex has told her) is both manipulative and cruel. “I thought you would be a better writer” she adds. Rich coming from someone asking a huge favour.

What Georgie wants isn’t a simple targeting for gain, but does she know that? Alex knows but helps anyway. Georgie’s son leaves her for New York and doesn’t want to see her again. As Alex points out, it’s what we do, not what we think we are, that defines us. She defies Georgie’s waffle about having a personality. Alex doesn’t believe in personality (we don’t have to agree), and thus understands far more of the play’s dynamics: though this is one of Stephens’ more conventional plays. “It’s the smallest things that destroy us, and the smallest things that save us” she comments. And “Sometimes I think life is about learning how to fall.”

Arcola’s brickish Studio 2 defies elaborate sets and two seats rearranged are varied with Rajiv Pattani’s occasionally piercing, often spectral light design. What a bendy light bar is doing as sole prop is puzzling. Hugh Sheehan’s sound delivers everything from Nicks through Amy Winehouse to that Bach Violin and keyboard Sonata in B minor: Alex’s morning-after choice.

Random collisions bring random consummations; neither Georgie nor Alex think in simply transactional terms. When Alex turns up at a school with Georgie in severely-hair-up teacher mode, it’s Georgie who’s surprised. And despite the latter’s perpetually brattish ripostes the kinetic effect takes both far away geographically and emotionally.

“Is this the strangest thing that two people have ever done in the history of the world?” Georgie asks. “No… but one of the stranger ones.” In the blank universe Alex invokes, looming solitude, the number of Christmases Alex has, almost distracts from the uneven energies that even Galloway and England can’t entirely surmount. But it’s between the notes their music plays; and that quiet magic is enough to crown this equivocal piece. If flawed it’s a fascinating, intimate piece given new life and with luck a new performing tradition. The most compelling two-hander now playing.

Costume Supervisor: Beth Qualter Buncall, Stage Manager Lola Glading, Artwork Designer Beth Suzanna.

Published April 19, 2025 by Simon Jenner