SHIFTING BETWEEN PARALLEL UNIVERSES
Constellations, a love story of quantum proportions
How to begin this feature? Maybe with: Having just directed Alice in Wonderland at the Shaw Festival, Peter Hinton is again diving down the rabbit hole, this time into the crazy sub-atomic world of quantum physics and string theory.
Or perhaps: Following in the footsteps of Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall in the West End, and of Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson on Broadway, Graham Cuthbertson and Cara Ricketts have been mugging up on quantum theory in preparation for playing two endlessly re-shuffled star-crossed lovers in Nick Payne’s international hit, Constellations.
Or how about: With its combination of quantum theory and romantic tragicomedy, Constellations has managed to spin theatrical gold out of déjà vu. But is there more to it than Groundhog Day on smart pills?
I could go on. In fact, if there’s any truth to the multiverse theories that underpin Payne’s phenomenally successful play, there could be an infinite number of “me’s” tapping out variations of these words right at this moment. Constellations draws on this theory to tell, re-tell and repeatedly re-calibrate the story of two thirtysomethings, physicist Marianne and beekeeper Roland, who meet at a party and whose relationship (or maybe their non-starter of a relationship) is viewed through the fracturing lens of quantum mechanics.
The fusion of science and theatre is a tough formula to crack. Playwrights like John Mighton and Michael Frayn have succeeded (see story below). But few have managed to convey such bewilderingly complex ideas with such lightness of touch as does Payne in Constellations, which this week gets its Canadian Englishlanguage première in a co-production between Toronto’s Canadian Stage Company and the Centaur (although it was performed in French last year at La Licorne).
I spoke with legendary Canadian director Peter Hinton and his cast of two, Graham Cuthbertson and Cara Ricketts, in separate telephone calls in various moments in time and space, and asked them if audiences should get to grips with the science behind the play as a preliminary.
“You don’t need to have a masters in physics to comprehend the play,” says Hinton, reassuringly. “It’s really successful at conveying the ideas of general relativity and quantum mechanics and string theory in a very accessible way and in a very theatrical manner.”
Nevertheless, the three have immersed themselves in quantum theory so you don’t have to, largely by consulting Brian Greene’s bestseller, The Elegant Universe, and speaking to experts from the University of Toronto. Could they hold their own if the subject came up at a party?
“I think we’d do OK enough to get a date, if that was the goal,” laughs Ricketts, before gamely offering the cheat-notes version. Both Cuthbertson and Hinton help out, too, and the possibility of multiverses begins to come into focus with descriptions of the sub-atomic breakdown of the rules of general relativity, hidden dimensions, the unifying of macro and micro worlds through string theory …
But, as the saying goes, if you think you understand quantum physics, you really don’t understand quantum physics, and by the end of these explanations, I’m still unsure as to whether the events in the play represent actual realities spread across an infinity of multiverses, or simply an abstract game of “what ifs.” As in “what if he’d said this instead of that?” or “what if she hadn’t invited him in that night?”, or “what if the tumour turns out to be benign or malignant or non-existent?”
But it’s perhaps not so much the science that matters as the way it allows for such an elegant and emotionally resonant structure. As Hinton says: “You’ve got to love a play where the main stage direction is that every time the font of the text changes, the universe changes. I love the dare of that, the challenge of how do we do that both theatrically and psychologically.”
As the action shifts at lightning speed between these universes (some scenes last seconds), the actors are called on to negotiate some pretty alarming hairpin bends in their performances.
“You absolutely do have to be able to turn on a dime,” says Cuthbertson, “more so maybe than I’ve experienced in a long time. There are some scene changes that are going to keep me up at night for the next two weeks. It’s about learning to shift from one world into the next with clarity and quickness, not necessarily dragging the previous world’s emotions into the next, but remembering what has happened, because that fuels the audience’s understanding of …”
Cuthbertson almost says “who
these people are” before remembering that, from the perspective the play, that perhaps doesn’t make sense. So instead he says “what these people can be.”
Ricketts, for her part, found herself being reminded of one of her favourite films, Woody Allen’s Melinda and Melinda.
“That film has the same thing happening twice,” she says “first time as tragedy, and then as comedy. I think all great tragedy can just as equally be funny, and I think Nick Payne is aware of that. He gives us the opportunity
to replay and repeat these situations where characters can be super-angry or super-hurt or super-violent, and the flip side of it is we can then play the sarcasm or the quirky humour of it.”
There’s arguably something of the rehearsal-room exercise in the way the play sometimes asks its actors to replay ostensibly identical scenes under different emotional pressures. (Cuthbertson, who featured in the Bob Dylan biopic I’m Not There, and Ricketts, who played in the TV series The Book of Negroes, might also be reminded of repeated takes for the camera). But Hinton insists that the play goes much deeper than that.
“On one hand, it’s full of this optimistic audacity of infinite possibility,” he says. “And on the other, there’s this kind of melancholy about how small we are in all that, how random life is, how brief it is. We rely so much on the idea of ‘this is me, this is who I am, this is what I do, this is my partner.’ But that’s one definition, what psychoanalysts call the life script. We get very determined into these things, and this play opens all that out.”
Which is a nice way to conclude things. Somewhere else, in a multiverse far, far away, Hinton is signing off with a chuckle that “essentially it’s Romeo and Juliet, but in a quantum, string-theory world.”