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by Simon Stephens, directed by Matthew Jocelyn

Canadian Stage, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

November 30-December 15, 2017

Georgie: “There’s no possible way of telling where a thing is going, and how fast it is going.”

With the Canadian premiere of Simon Stephens’s Heisenberg, Matthew Jocelyn has directed his last play with Canadian Stage as it artistic director.  Jocelyn draws strong, complex performances from his cast and gives the play an elegant, minimalist production.  Yet, the play itself is the problem.  It’s an improbable opposites-attract romantic comedy that Stephens tries to lend greater importance by its allusion to theoretical physics.

The action begins just after Georgie Burns (Carly Street), a 42-year-old American woman, plants a kiss on the back of the neck of Alex Priest (David Schurmann), a 75-year-old British butcher in the middle of St. Pancras Station in London.  After that act, which would count as harassment if done by a man to a woman, the garrulous Georgie forces the quiet Alex into a conversation that he only wishes would end.  She tells Alex a long tale about herself including her main source of sadness that her 19-year-old son Jason has left home and broken off all contact with her.  From her non-stop speech in which she mixes prying questions and apologies with insults and praise, it is not hard for us to see why her son might leave her.  

In the second of the play’s six scenes we find that Georgie has tracked Alex down to his distinctly unbusy butcher’s shop and begins her verbal assault all over again, this time to apologize for her behaviour at the train station and to tell him that the entire life history she gave him, except for the part about her son Jason, was a complete fabrication.  From this point on we are wary of anything Georgie says.

This sort of uncertainty is not what the famous “uncertainty principle” formulated in 1927 by German quantum physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-76) was about.  In the original German, Heisenberg called the “uncertainty principle” “Unschärferelation” (“indistinctness relationship”) or “Unbestimmtheitsrelation” (indefiniteness relationship”).  “Certainty” has nothing to do with it.  Measurability does.  According to Jocelyn’s restatement of the principle, “It is impossible at any given moment to know both the position (or nature) of an object and its momentum, or direction”.  In Georgie’s words, “There's no possible way of telling where a thing is going, and how fast it is going”.  The more you focus on precisely measuring the object itself, the less precisely you can measure its position and speed and vice versa.  People without a scientific background like to think that Heisenberg’s principle means that we can’t know anything for sure, whereas it really means precision in one form of measurement entails loss of precision in another form of measurement.

What Stephens gives us in his play named after the physicist is a series of scenes each of which makes an increasingly unlikely jump from the situation in one scene to that in the one following.  Stephens focusses on the objects of his attention, Georgie and Alex, but deliberately conceals the means that moves them from one stage to the next in their relationship.  He follows the Heisenberg principle only by forcing us to guess at what momentum or direction has effected the new situation.  Thus, when Alex says he will not go on a date with Georgie and we find in the next scene that he is, we have to assume that he reconsidered his “no” from the previous scene and that Georgie’s invasion of his privacy is not as irksome to him as it had appeared.

Yet, even if this is so, Stephens has made petty use of such an important scientific concept and has forced us to see only one aspect of the principle (focus on the object) rather than the other aspect (focus on the direction and speed).  In fact, it is the direction and speed of the change in the relationship between Georgie and Alex that makes the play so improbable.  When each scene contradicts our view of the characters in the previous scene, we eventually give up trying to understand them and don’t really care what direction their relationship takes.

At least Jocelyn has found two excellent proponents of the roles.  Carly Street is expert at conveying the humour of awkwardness.  She makes Georgie’s mixture of insults with apologies and personal revelations with retractions appear so natural that her lines almost seem improvised.  There is no doubt that even if Georgie is 42, Stephens has still formed her in the mould of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl cliché formulated by film critic Nathan Rabin of free-spirited women who help depressed or world-weary men experience the beauty of life again.  Street can do nothing to rid Georgie of this stereotypical function.  What she does, though, is increasingly to emphasize that beneath Georgie’s manic, erratic behaviour lies a deep sorrow and longing for companionship.  It is too bad that Stephens makes Georgie aggressive to the point of obnoxiousness.  With Georgie as everyone’s nightmare flight seat-mate, Street has to struggle to attempt to present her as a more rounded character.

David Schurmann’s Alex stands in perfect contrast to Street’s Georgie.  He is slow, deliberate, reserved and more likely to express his feelings through an intense stare or silence than in words.  It is a superb performance and communicates levels of interest in Alex that lie below his show of indifference or even anger.  It is largely because Schurmann is able to suggest that there are depths beneath Alex’s still surface (another character cliché) that the play’s plot merely seems improbable instead of sheer nonsense.

Jocelyn has staged the play in the round on Teresa Przybylski’s plain, wooden-planked playing area.  The more static scenes he has placed on a revolve in the centre of the area that moves at a leisurely pace in contrast to Georgie’s mile-a-minute logorrhoea.  This movement along with the hiding places at the four corners of the stage suggest hidden possibilities and engines of motion that change our lives without our fully being aware of them. 

Those expecting a play with a clear, gripping, poignant story like Stephens’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012), seen here earlier this year will be disappointed at Heisenberg’s hard-to-like characters and their contradictory actions.  Those looking for another British play where human relationships are meant to illustrate scientific ideas as in Penelope Skinner’s Eigengrau (2010) or Nick Payne’s Constellations (2012), will find that Heisenberg does not succeed as well as either one.  Indeed, the play that best illustrates Heisenberg’s principle is the one where Heisenberg himself is a character – namely Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998) about Heisenberg’s secret meeting with nuclear physicist scientist Niels Bohr in 1941.  There Frayn creates a perfect marriage between the impossibility of judging both an object and its speed and direction by presenting three accounts of the same meeting by the supposed participants at that meeting.                                            

Those who love the work of Carly Street and David Schurmann, of whom there are many, will be thrilled to see them on stage together.  Those looking for a romantic comedy that does not pretend to be more than it is will have to look elsewhere.

       

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) David Schurmann and Carly Street; David Schurmann and Carly Street. ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.canadianstage.com.