Cherishable turn from Kenneth Cranham in a tenuously titled romance
Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle
We need to talk about the title of Simon Stephens’s first venture into the West End since his award-laden adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. Heisenberg: The Uncertainty
Principle sounds like the sort of thing Melvyn Bragg would invite clever people into one Radio 4 studio to talk about. It implies, surely, that if you’re interested in the Nobel Prizewinning theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and his world-shattering observation about the way that the universe works – or, rather, the way we observe the universe at work – then you’ve come to the right play.
Those assuming, however, that they will emerge as well briefed and intellectually nourished as they did, say, from Tom Morton-smith’s recent bio-drama Oppenheimer – or, for that matter, Michael Frayn’s bedazzling Copenhagen, which brilliantly imagines the enigmatic wartime meetings between Heisenberg and fellow physicist Niels Bohr, need to be warned that this show operates according to what I call “Stephens’s Law”.
Namely, the grander his title, the more tangential its relation to the content.
This isn’t to say that Heisenberg
– which reunites Stephens with the creative team behind Curious Incident (and helps launch director Marianne Elliott’s new production company)
– is wholly without reference to the famous “uncertainty principle”. A few scenes into this 90-minute twohander, Georgie – a loose-cannon fortysomething American in London who has casually befriended a septuagenarian butcher called Alex – explains how she failed to spot the direction her now-estranged son was going in. “If you watch something closely enough you realise you have no possible way of telling where it’s going or how fast it’s getting there,” she explains. “Did you know that? If you pay attention to where it’s going or how fast it’s moving you stop watching it properly.” Et voila. “That’s the f-----uncertainty Principle”. At the end of Curious Incident, the teen hero gives a six-minute brainstorming answer to a complex maths question that makes you feel cleverer just listening to it; here, you’re left none the wiser and if you removed every vague allusion to quantum mechanics, the play would remain intact.
Which gifts us, effectively, with a slightly cutesy, slow-burn romance between two people existing in a state of emotional loss (and, yup, uncertainty) who – because life is for living – wind up in bed together, and later on in Jersey City, contemplating a trip to Manhattan (eat your heart out, Woody Allen). The age difference is striking – but not creepily, offputtingly so. This easy-to-chew theatrical morsel is the palatable essence of pre-supper theatre.
The slippery Georgie, nicely played by Anne-marie Duff with a flirtatious brashness so determinedly “winning” it almost isn’t, laughs in the face of Kenneth Cranham’s Alex when she learns he’s 75. Being an old-fashioned gent, and having had no physical intercourse with women since the Fifties (plausibility alert), the oldster suffers her taunts with good grace.
And if there’s something genuinely cherishable about the evening it’s the way Cranham beautifully charts his character’s shift from reticence to release, like a grumpy cat that warily rolls over to let its tummy be tickled by a stranger.
The design, it should be scientifically observed, is little less than gorgeous: Bunny Christie conjures walls that shift this way and that and sparse furniture that tilts magically into view; Paule Constable’s lighting creates achingly lovely surges of background colour. Yet the visual tricksiness speaks volumes about the puff-of-smoke nature of the thing. Would I pay £85 top price to watch it? Certainly not.