Constellations, a 70-minute play by a thirty year-old Englishman, has been a success wherever it has been produced all over the world. One English reviewer wrote that his play “can stand comparison with Tom Stoppard, Michael Frayn and Caryl Churchill.” Heady praise indeed. 

The plot is both simple and complex. It starts at an ordinary barbecue where Marianne meets Roland. He is an apiarist and she a quantum physicist. The meeting abruptly ends there but it also continues as we are given glimpses of some of the other scenarios that can occur in the infinite possibilities of existence in a parallel universe.

Marianne says “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”  You’ll be surprised and amused by Roland’s reply. The play is often very funny.  

Will there be a next meeting? Will his marriage be a barrier to romance? Will former lovers and affairs lead to a break-up? Will love triumph? But there is much more to the play than just another romance. 

In short Constellations has it both ways. We follow a romance developing into a lasting relationship and while doing so we come to acknowledge that, as director Rachel Lenart says in a programme note, “Standing in the middle of infinity, really it is the minutiae that matters”.

And it is in the minutiae of the relationship that Erin Banks and Richard Dey reveal all the possible (that we are allowed to see) complex emotional subtleties and facets of two people’s developing relationship. Their very fine performances move with lightening speed from light to dark with a deftness that is always startling and moving. It must also be hell to memorise. 

They are given superior support from composer Tane Upjohn-Beaton whose music combined with Lauren Stewart’s setting of two stylish benches and numerous naked light bulbs and a black backdrop fretted with golden hexagons complement the play’s themes perfectly in Rachel Lenart’s elegant production of this fascinating play.

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The instant a writer of fiction in any form – or a composer, choreographer or artist of any kind – starts work on a new idea, they are playing the ‘what if …?’ game. Some people like to think our lives are determined by a higher power – God – so tend to see whatever happens as ‘meant to be’. Others are more inclined to ‘chaos theory’ but feel compelled to find meaning in whatever happens randomly. 

Most of us muse from time to time on the complex network of choices, purposeful actions and unexpected events that impact our lives, and wonder ‘what if?’. Perhaps our genes seal certain elements of our fate but we get to choose what we make that mean and how we handle it. Or could it be that every action any of us takes is simply an inevitable consequence of all that has gone before, which means ‘choice’ is illusory? 

These are the metaphysical conundrums British playwright Nick Payne – a graduate of York University, Central School of Speech and Drama, and the Royal Court Young Writer’s Programme – plays with in Constellations, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2012.

Initially it seems he’s tossing around different options for how a relationship might start when Marianne and Roland meet at a barbecue, and the actors – Erin Banks and Richard Dey, in this Rachael Lenart-directed production at Circa Theatre – are testing the options for him. But of course the variations are the point, although her opening gambit about licking elbows remains a constant.

It turns out Roland is a beekeeper who admires the bees’ absolute certainty of purpose, determined by their role in the hive hierarchy. Marianne is a quantum physicist and muses on quantum multiverse theory, where everything you’ve ever done exists in one universe while everything you’ve never done but could have done instead – i.e. every possible future – exists in parallel universes. But maintaining a sense free will, of control, over her life is important: “I have to have a choice!” she insists, in one of the many recurring sequences.  

While Michael Frayn’s superbly crafted Copenhagen, which played in the same Circa Two space in 2002, is a profound and playful philosophical exploration of Werner Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the quantum mechanics of science, politics and other human behaviour, Nick Payne simply uses quantum mechanics, general relativity, string theory and beekeeping as a background conceptual context.

The variations on the story of Marianne and Roland’s relationship are played out in everyday – some might say prosaic – scenarios we can all relate to, and Banks and Dey do a brilliant job of switching from one possibility to another, infusing each with entirely or subtly different emotions, moods and states of being. The lightness of touch they bring to the transitions belies the rigorous process they and Lenart must have gone through in rehearsal. The truth they bring to each moment generates some delightful comedy.

Intercut with the relatively linear relationship story is a glimpse of something that presages what is to come – although “time is irrelevant at the level of atoms” – and here Payne is teasing us with ‘what is it?’ rather than ‘what if?’ In developing a script most playwrights also ask themselves ‘what would it take?’ to produce a result they wish to achieve and of course Payne has made a choice that clearly determines the story’s destination.  

What is finally revealed is a radical ‘game-changer’, again a range of alternatives are played out and in the end the question of choice becomes what you might call ‘ultimate’ (obliqueness intended to avoid a spoiler).

Apart from the great pleasure of watching two actors ply their craft exquisitely, Constellations engages its audience by compelling us to analyse and judge the variables, and ask ourselves what we would have done in the circumstances.

Lauren Stewart’s simple black box space is furnished only with two slatted pale pine seats. Honeycomb shapes dot the back walls and clear glass light bulbs hang in the space and over the small auditorium and glow in various combinations: the major feature of Marcus McShane’s lighting design. Tane Upjohn-Beatson’s sound design and ethereal original compositions – recorded with violin soloist Yury Gezentsvey and the Quadrivium string quartet – complete the splendidly integrated design elements, implemented by Technical Operator  Deb McGuire.   

It’s probably irrelevant for me to wonder what if Payne had further explored the question of choice, control and responsibility by including some reference to the global threat to bee populations, and therefore to our very survival, brought about by insecticides. But that’s how it goes with a play like this: you can’t help thinking …

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