Love story with starry quality
Constellations (Vaudeville Theatre, London)
Verdict: Super cosmic rom-com ★★★★☆
CONSTELLATIONS is a multi-dimensional love story by Nick Payne, written for two actors and set in an infinite number of universes. The beauty of it is that you can cast almost anyone, of any age; and there may be no upper limit to the number of stars you could fix in its firmament.
Kicking off this Donmar Warehouse production, being staged at the Vaudeville, we have Zoe Wanamaker and former Doctor Who actor Peter Capaldi; and Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah.
Each pair takes turns, in different performances to play a couple who meet at a damp British barbecue. (Still to come is Motherland’s Anna Maxwell Martin, performing with comedian Chris O’Dowd; and Omari Douglas and Being Human’s Russell Tovey.)
Written in 2012, Constellations is a very special kind of rom-com which sets out different versions of multiple scenes between a beekeeper (him) and a cosmologist (her). They resist each other at first, then get together. They move in, move out, get married, fall ill, get better, grow worse and try to face a bitter end for one of them in an unnamed clinic abroad.
In one way, it’s a baffling Rubik’s cube inspired by quantum physics and the idea that we live not in a single universe but in a ‘multiverse’ of infinite worlds.
Here, every possible variation of every possible moment in our lives is played out in other dimensions. It may sound baffling but it taps into the infinity of our everyday hopes and fears. Even better, it’s a gift for actors to showcase their talents. Capaldi and Wanamaker bring gravitas to the equation. He is wry and lived-in. She is strident yet secretly needy. But some things in the play, which was written for younger actors, don’t work so well for them.
I suspect bus-pass holders of Capaldi’s age do mind sleeping on
the floor; and women Wanamaker’s age don’t move in with 24-year-old boys they have just met. It runs better for thirtysomethings Jeremiah and Atim. There is more life ahead of them; the stakes feel higher. Her illness is more shocking; and that makes them a more moving combination of lovers.
The play is given a dreamy quality by Tom Scutt’s design,
featuring a galaxy of balloons overhead — like stars, or a scattering of atoms. One scene is performed in British Sign Language, which adds an eerie interlude.
It’s a beguiling 70 minutes that could run and run, with different actors, in a pan-cosmic groundhog day. Perhaps that is already happening in another dimension.
CATCH Daniel Mays and David Thewlis in a revival of Harold Pinter’s 1957 play The Dumb Waiter online at London’s Old Vic. This is the one about two hitmen waiting to do a job in the former kitchen of a Birmingham cafe.
Jeremy Herrin’s production is cunningly cast as a Laurel and Hardy double act, with undertones of Quentin Tarantino’s
Reservoir Dogs. Mays plays the clammy, cheeky, Hardy-ish one, getting increasingly stressed out during the 45-minute sketch.
Thewlis is the lean, leathery, Laurel-ish old hand, trying to suppress misgivings of his own. They make Pinter’s mannered, sometimes illogical dialogue seem effortlessly natural. And Hyemi Shin’s dingy set lends the atmosphere of a death-row cell. Pinter’s gallows humour at its best.
Until tomorrow night; tickets from oldvictheatre.com. For more reviews, see Mail Online.