✭✭✭✩✩

by Nick Payne, directed by Peter Hinton

Canadian Stage, Bluma Appel Theatre, Toronto

November 10-27, 2016

Marianne: “You can’t go on living and living and living”

British playwright Nick Payne’s Constellations brilliantly applies the theory of a quantum multiverse to the relationship of two ordinary people.  The result is that rare thing – a play that appeals to the intellect as well as the emotions and is both funny and moving at once.  The play needs only fine acting to be effective and Cara Ricketts and Graham Cuthbertson are excellent choices for the roles.  Their success, however, is impeded by Peter Hinton’s concept production that both calls attention to itself and makes little sense of the action.

The play involves the meeting of Marianne (Ricketts) and Roland (Cuthbertson) at a summer barbecue.  She works at Cambridge inputting data for a project investigating the “many worlds” theory of the universe, while he is a beekeeper who makes and sells his own honey.  Though the two jobs could not appear more different, Payne shows that they both are metaphors for the lack of free will.  Bee society is genetically programmed to be hierarchical with the three castes of bees and their social and biological functions already predetermined.  Initially, the many worlds theory would seem to be an expression of free will but, as Marianne explains, it is not: “In the quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you’ve ever made and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”  Every “choice” we make merely indicates which of the infinite pre-exiting universes we live in. 

To show this in action, Payne has Marianne and Roland play out several versions of every stage of their relationship.  Marianne flirts with Roland and he is, successively, any combination of available/unavailable and interested/uninterested.  They are back at her place and and he stays or goes and sleeps with her or not.  One or the other is or is not unfaithful to the other.  Roland proposes and is accepted, put off or rejected.  They meet again at a ballroom dance class and for many different reasons do or don’t reconnect.  Marianne confides in Roland that she has a brain tumour that affects her speech and writing.  It is benign in one version, malignant in another.  She has an operation that is or is not successful.  She does or does not respond to treatment.  Despairing because of her increasing incapacity she does or does not seek euthanasia in Switzerland. 

The dialogue thus involves lots of repetition with variations.  In the first part of the play the the stark differences of effect are amusing.  In the second part the differences have us hanging on every word to find out what range of possibilities the characters must confront.  The relationship moves from stage to stage but we know in general how one stage ends only by how the next stage begins.  We watch the many false starts to each stage anxious about which of these will finally take hold.  As the text of the play makes clear, each repetition indicates “a change in universe”.

Payne specifies no set of any kind and, indeed, the play needs only a bare stage.  For the Canadian Stage production Peter Hinton has requested a very specific set.  Ricketts and Cuthbertson act almost the entire play on a raised circular platform the outer ring of which is a revolve.  Designer Michael Gianfrancesco has added a large inflated sphere in the background and two layers of drops to cover the back wall – the first clear, the second reflective.  As lit by Andrea Lundy, this causes there to be two levels of reflections of the actors in the background.  Hinton has also added, for unknown reasons, a live cellist, Jane Chan, who accompanies the action and artfully reflects the changes of mood.  Did he get this idea from Hannah Moscovitch’s play Infinity (2015), a play also about the many worlds theory, that requires the inclusion of a live violinist?

Hinton’s use of this raised acting space with its donut revolve causes two main difficulties.  The first of these has two aspects, one to do with the circular stage stage itself, the other with how Hinton’s employs it.  First, while a circle often is

used as a symbol of infinity, it does not accurately reflect the idea of the many worlds theory in which a life is a series of choices that keeps branching off each other, or borrowing the title of  Borges’s short story, the “garden of forking paths”.  Hinton has Ricketts and Cuthbertson step off the circular stage only when they each admit to sleeping with another person.  Thus, the circular stage seems more to represent their relationship with each other than the universe. 

Yet Hinton has Marianne demonstrate the many worlds theory to Roland by putting a shoe on the outer ring in a spotlight and watch it revolve until it arrives in the same place under the same light.  This demonstrates recurrence or the cyclical nature of time not the many worlds theory which make one wonder if Hinton mistakenly thinks they are similar.                                    

Hinton uses the circular stage in every possible way.  He has the actors walk along the outer ring as it is moving.  He has one actor on the ring orbit the other standing on the non-moving centre.  At one time he has the two actors on the ring and pushes up the speed so much that the two have to lean in in order not to thrown off.  The key thing Hinton does not do with the stage is use it to indicate changes in “universe”.  That he leaves to  Lundy’s enormous range of lighting effects.  It soon becomes apparent that there is no way to link what Hinton does with the circular stage to what is happening in the play.  Whether the ring revolves or not and how fast is moves seems to depend solely on Hinton’s whim rather than act as a means of illuminating the text.   

The second main difficulty caused by Hinton’s circular stage is that he seems more focussed on the effects he can produce with it that with drawing great performances from the actors.  One aspect of the play praised both in London and New York was the way that the original director Michael Longhurst encouraged the cast to speak each repeated passage in vastly different ways to show how the same words take on different meanings with a different tone and emphasis.  That, sadly, is not how Hinton directs Ricketts and Cuthbertson.  The actors certainly are skilled enough to inflect each repetition differently, but Hinton has them speak each repetition in exactly the same way with only the varied endings being different.  This is vastly unfair to the actors and unfair to the audience since a change in their tone would also help signal a change of universe. 

Ricketts and Cuthbertson are both engaging actors and they make their geeky, self-conscious characters highly sympathetic.  We follow their halting progress through their relationship wishing that all will work out well.  But, as the play makes clear we who observe them can do no more to change what happens to them than they can.

Before the many worlds theory was published J. B. Priestley believed that past, present and future all exist simultaneously and wrote plays like Time and the Conways (1937) to demonstrate this idea.  John Mighton’s Possible Worlds (1990) may have been the first play after the many worlds theory was formulated in 1957 to incorporate it in drama.  Unfortunately, the theory does not inform the dramatic structure of Mighton’s play to the deep extent that it does in Payne and the idea is ultimately shown to be an illusion which it is not in Payne.  Payne really is the first to embody the “garden of forking paths” image of the many worlds theory in the form of the dialogue itself and to depict its effect over a long period of time.  The play itself may be only 75 minutes long, but the depth of the intellectual questions it poses and the emotions it evokes are more than most plays two or three times that length ever achieve.  The pity is that audiences in Toronto should have to encounter a play as brilliant as Payne’s in a production as unhelpful as Hinton’s.  

No wonder the original production had no use for a gimmick like a revolve and relied instead on the actors themselves to effect the shift from universe to universe.  That way we would not be distracted from the acting by watching a director playing with his new toy and could focus more on what is essential to the characters and its impact on their lives.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive. 

Photos: (from top) Graham Cuthbertson and Cara Ricketts; Cara Ricketts and Graham Cuthbertson. ©2016 Andrée Lanthier.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.