Most of us have looked back at points in our life and wondered ‘What if?’

Constellations takes this idea and runs it through a prism, showing us moments in a relationship split into possibilities. It sets the idea up swiftly with a neat light and sound cue to let us know when we’re seeing an alternate possibility. Marianne (Natalie Swart) is breaking the ice with Roland (Jordan Mooney) at a barbecue. Initially it falls flat, but as we slip between possibilities they grow closer. It’s a clever way to draw a narrative, one in which even though the characters themselves have no continuity, we as the audience observe a progression.

There are some well placed mentions of multiverse science here and there (Marianne is a cosmologist) but it’s mostly a show about the ‘What ifs’ and the value to be had in either our uniqueness or our place in infinity.

As a two-header based entirely around interaction, the productions hangs on the script and the ability of the actors to perform it, and Constellations has both of these locked in. Swart and Mooney bounce of each other with a lovable chemistry and tenderness. [More] 

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Constellations is a play about what-ifs. About a third of way through, Marianne (Natalie Swart) explains to Roland (Jordan Mooney) the mechanism that undergirds the play: the by-product of our contemporary understanding of the universe – concepts like general relativity, quantum theory and super/string theory – is that a multiverse exists in which all possibilities play out. 

Premiering in 2012, with the equally magnificent Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins as Roland the beekeeper and Marianne the cosmologist respectively, Constellations has gone from strength to strength, selling out shows from the West End to Peru [including The Court in Christchurch and Circa in Wellington – ed] . In the show’s programme, director Mel Martin notes that it was the Jake Gyllenhaal / Ruth Wilson combination on Broadway in 2015 that won her over to the charms of Nick Payne’s endearing script about infinity.

The play opens like many others: woman meets man. Then woman meets man again. Then again. The same scene – the same introduction, or slightly different – played out throughout countless superimposed what-ifs. Woman and man get together – or they don’t. They fight – or they don’t. There’s an infidelity; there’s an illness – or maybe there isn’t. And so the play bucks its way forward and back, such that we’re invited into the myriad what-ifs of Payne’s universe(s). Constellations offers a hundred glimpses across possible versions of this pair’s lives in which different outcomes come to pass.

The joy of the script is the realisation that every ending has to occur, a layering sure to assure as much as it leaves the audience with a distinct sense of melancholy. So, when we’re offered a view of an uplifting ending, we’re also reminded of those less-than-desirable ones that must also, surely, have happened to another Roland and Marianne. The tragedy, then, is not that such-and-such fate will occur, but that for some pairing, it was always going to occur.

But this is all mechanics. The play is not about its plot(s). As a two-hander invested in the philosophy of maybes and fate vs choice, Constellations foremost necessitates charismatic and endearing performances for its characters, some of whom we only encounter for a few seconds at a time.

Both Jordan Mooney (Roland) and Natalie Swart (Marianne) are delights on the stage, their dynamic and expressive performances sustained in bold, high-energy across the show. The script – which features virtually no stage directions and signals a change of universe with an indented rule line – leaves the director and actors to find their own interpretation; our Roland and Marianne are dramatically different in each universe, requiring Olympic level acting from our pair to take their characters in myriad directions.

Mooney’s Rolands are sometimes subdued, threatening, guarded or frustrated, depending on which universe they’re from; Swart’s Mariannes are toying, bashful, raunchy, forward. Particular delight can be found in Swart’s micro-expressions and hesitations that serve to enrich her Mariannes and colour her parts of the story.

However, because scenes often repeat (or near offer), and often with wildly different characterisations in Martin’s approach, it becomes difficult to grasp each character as whole or complete. Paradoxically, by having every possible version of these two, we’re given a limited sense of who they are.

While the galloping energy of the show undoubtedly entertains, it’s the performance’s unrelenting pace and unforgivingly high intensity that is its shortcoming. I recall a similar problem affecting Black Box Creative’s 2017 version of Romeo and Juliet in which our characters stormed and shouted their way through Shakespeare. The result is a double-edge sword for Constellations: the rapid-fire dialogue abhors boredom but also offers little emotional landscape and pigeonholes the performances in a way. The script is done in little over an hour and without pathos or thinking room. There’s a desperate need to relax, lest the audience be left behind.

Some additional aspects that are worthy of attention: the wooshing sound effects with micro blackout to signify the change of universe feels distractingly Doctor Who (the Gyllenhaal / Wilson clips online hint at a more subtle rear-of-stage cloud lightning and accompanying thunder effect). Contrast this with some fine lighting work and the set design; the simple, malleable staging and the flotsam of life – a tricycle, a suitcase, records, a boot, a picture frame – that floats above the stage as if falling through from higher universes.

The sum of the show is excellence distracted with some muddled deficiencies. Constellations is unquestionably entertaining, sustained by its energetic leads and hopeful what-iffery. It still shines, but could be more luminous yet.

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