On the stage
AREMARKABLE cosmic event is unfolding almost every night in the Montecasino cluster of the Fourways galaxy: a play about infinite rights and wrongs, possibilities and inevitabilities, called CONSTELLATIONS.
Written by young British playwright Nick Payne, it is a riveting take on the concept of one life, many potential outcomes. Think Sliding Doors or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and you’re halfway there.
Some subscribe to the notion that our life paths are preordained and set in stone by destiny or some higher power; others believe that every day, every minute we encounter forks in life’s road and make choices that lead us in different directions. Still others believe that the final destination is predetermined, but the journey to get there is a matter of personal choice, with a network of tributaries leading to the same point. And then there are those who simply shrug it off, saying life is a random accident.
Have you ever thought about that one choice, that one spontaneous decision or chance encounter that could have altered you forever? A phone call unreturned, a deadline missed, the love of your life who somehow got away?
This is what Constellations, which won the UK’s Evening Standard award for best play in 2012, leaves you chewing on. Director Alan Swerdlow has brought to vivid life an ostensibly complex, yet glaringly simple, story of an everyday relationship — told through multiple parallel universes.
The way it’s posited (although not in a befuddling scientific way), quantum physics theory suggests that we have the ability to flip between parallel universes — hence the phenomenon of déjà vu. The notion of such a “multiverse” raises the fascinating question: is there an infinite number of realities coexisting for us in space and time?
WITH a script that provides the director with the scantiest of stage directions, Swerdlow and actors Ashley Dowds and Janna Ramos-Violante have had to use their noggins, skills and intuition to conjure a theatre experience: a love story that makes you think. It is excellent.
Roland and Mary meet at a barbecue: he is a beekeeper; she an academic. A flirtatious Mary makes a cheesy remark about how it’s impossible to lick one’s elbow. They chat and banter. In one of these universes, she is dating someone else. In an alternate universe, he is seeing someone else — and so the encounter is left at that.
But in a succession of other universes, they are both unattached, and a subsequent scene sees them landing up at her flat. In one iteration, she gets cold feet and dispatches her would-be lover with frosty dismissiveness; in another, she sends him packing but with a gentler mien. In other scenarios, they end up sleeping together. Each sparks further chain reactions.
What’s particularly fascinating is that in Swerdlow’s interpretation, it is not merely the words that are spoken that affect the subsequent outcome, but the manner in which they are spoken. On any given day we could be feeling playful, fragile, irritable, optimistic, antagonistic, confident, empathetic or bristly. We could be feeling passive, or passiveaggressive. Our actions could be rational or impulsive. This means that we could react in a number of ways to different events, sparking endless potential scenarios.
Constellations explores, with wit and heart, the multiple variables that can affect our actions, reactions and interactions. Intelligent, absorbing and moving, it is a highly enriching piece about happy serendipity and the darker machinations of fate.
It is also about two adept actors taking on what could very well be the roles of a lifetime. And it is about a director who relishes being given an extraordinary script to play with and coax magic out of.
On at the upstairs Studio theatre at Montecasino Theatre until September 28, after which it transfers to the Theatre on the Bay in Camps Bay, Cape Town.