Constellations, Gate Theatre review — melodrama in the multiverse

Boy meets girl at a rain-sodden barbecue. They hit it off. Or maybe they don’t. Rather, they hit it off in one version of reality but don’t in a parallel universe. Indeed, their relationship plays out in myriad different ways across the infinite permutations of the multiverse.

The quantum mechanics-inspired premise of Constellations sounds byzantine. And yet, despite its background in theoretical physics, this 2012 two-hander by Nick Payne has an underlying structural simplicity. The thirtysomething duo at first perform variations on a handful of scenes centred on the twists and turns of courtship. It then veers in a sombre direction amid anxious exchanges about cancer and assisted suicide. For all the Pinterish repetitions, Payne’s play, here making its Irish debut, has the topsy-turvy feel of an old-fashioned melodrama.

As Roland, a tongue-tied beekeeper, Brian Gleeson exudes gauche charm as he struggles to woo Sarah Morris’s Marianne with displays of apicultural nous. A chap who can boast of making honey on the roof of his city-centre flat ought to have little difficulty cutting a romantic dash. But his bumbling requests for “feedback” after a calamitous date point to a lost soul who longs to escape the emotional upheaval of humanity for the predictable world of the hive. In the play’s comic climax, he even resorts to a prepared speech about the sex life of bees (which alternately carries the day and falls flat in different sections of the multiverse).

Marianne superficially serves as a cerebral foil to Roland’s bewildered farmer. An academic working in “theoretical early-universe cosmology”, she duly offers a limpid overview of the concept of parallel universes as well as the tensions between quantum mechanics and relativity theory. But, swerving between effusive flirtation and indifference, Marianne ultimately seems as ill-equipped as Roland to navigate the choppy currents of love and desire.

Morris deftly navigates these emotional shifts in a performance that exploits the play’s central conceit to reveal rival versions of her character. She and Gleeson display ample chemistry. And yet we never forget that their relationship rests on unsteady physical ground. Love emerges here not through fate but a series of fortuitous accidents, which, in several versions of the story, never come to pass.

With a few tweaks to the script, the play’s setting has been seamlessly shifted from London to Dublin. Marc Atkinson Borrull’s 75-minute staging, performed on a bare, mirror-bounded stage, nonetheless creates an ethereal mood that evokes the intangibility of space and time. The only certainty here is the inevitability of death, which becomes the dominant theme of the final half-hour.

These sections provide a stark contrast to Marianne and Roland’s earlier iterative banter. But they also feel a bit contrived. Having toyed with emotional and narrative ambiguity, Constellations settles into a familiar groove of encroaching medical catastrophe. The effect is rather soapy and detracts from the play’s explorations of contingency. After so much emphasis on the random gyrations of existence, Constellations ends up seeming predictable as it moves towards its neatly sorrowful denouement.

★★★☆☆

To June 2, gatetheatre.ie