Review: CONSTELLATIONS, Vaudeville Theatre

You've probably heard of Schrödinger's cat, the scientist's moggy who wasn't sure to be alive or dead until we opened the box. One day, it's off to that spot under the apple tree in the garden and a little plaque on the ground; the next day, it's up the apple tree chasing sparrows. Until we look, we don't know.

Lights up and we're looking Manuel and Roland, flirting a little, but it goes nowhere. Lights up and we're looking at Manuel and Roland, flirting a little, getting on okay... but it goes nowhere. Lights up and we're looking at Manuel and Roland, flirting a little, getting on okay and they go for a drink. Romance, like the cat, sometimes dead and sometimes alive - all we need to do is look.

In the last nine years, Nick Payne's hit play has travelled round theatre's very own Large Hadron Collider, from The Donmar Warehouse, to Broadway and now back to the West End, electrifying audiences with its magnetic appeal. Sure, it's obligatory to mention quantum theory in any review, but you don't need any of that stuff to enjoy the ingenuity of the play's structure - after all, the premise that life is a series of decision trees is a central theme in the writing of Jorge Luis Borges, in the SF blockbuster Dune and in the movie Sliding Doors. And who hasn't, with a wistful look over the shoulder, wondered "What if?"

Omari Douglas is Manuel, a cosmologist (though I'm sure I met him 500 times when I worked in fashion in the 80s) full of bubbly bright bonhomie. Russell Tovey is Roland, a beekeeper, reticent, cautious, more box than cat as it were.

Soon we're falling down an algorithm, as we see the same words spoken, but, underpinned by different attitudes, different decisions are made and different outcomes ensue. Manuel and Roland don't get it on, almost get it on, do get it on; gravitate towards each other, drift slowly apart, drift back together; need each other, don't need each other, need each other again.

Sure there's a bit of drama school warm-up exercise about the conceit, but it's not long before you're wrapped up in these two lives and fascinated by how relationships can fracture or heal on little more than the selection of the right tone of voice.

It all seems so random - but much of life and, we're soon reminded, death, is. Who knows what will result from the flap of a butterfly's wings, when just one can raise a tornado?

For this to work, pace is critical and director, Michael Longhurst, never lets up through the 75 minutes all-through running time. Payne's script is so clever that we never lose sight of the central conceit (that all these forks in the road lead to their own unique paths) but a compelling central narrative emerges, filled with love and tragedy.

Tovey gets his solid everymanish apiarist just right. As his mood, and hence his reactions change, we never lose sight of the fully formed personality that behaves differently, but always credibly, as the relationship twists and turns with each scene.

Douglas dials up the camp a little too high for my taste early on, but that does add poignancy to the cruel fate that emerges for such a livewire presence.

Without getting meta (what am I saying, this is the most meta play ever!) seeing a second cast - four have rotated through this run - lends more nuance to those "Might have happened", "Might not have happened" and "Did Happen" narrative strands.

Anna Maxwell Martin is the cosmologist second time round and Chris O'Dowd the beekeeper. Within seconds we're into a different play - same script, natch - but the dynamic between the actors brings out entirely new interpretations. Even something as mundane as the height difference between the lovers moves the power dial one way and then the other.

It's outrageously satisfying to see the (by now familiar) scenes play out. Unencumbered by that slight excess of camp first time round, Maxwell Martin explores the nuance of the comedy more fully, the sulks and scowls of disappointment when things don't work out, the delight / indifference / ooh... awkward moment of meeting an ex-lover years after the split. And (probably a personal thing) that gender-blind casting problem emerged again - words written for a woman sound more natural when spoken at the pitch of a woman's voice.

O'Dowd dials up Roland's occasional tipsiness into something a little closer to drunkenness and there's more charisma on show as this Roland is more open, less closed off. That approach works well in the first half of the play, but loses a little power later on, as we don't quite get the sense of psychological struggle Roland endures when reaching out to Marianne in her time of need.

Suffice it to say that each cast succeeds in finding both the heart of the play and their own unique takes on its themes, its comedy, its tragedy.

We comfort ourselves that we're where we are right now because we made our own decisions and that we're also planning our own futures using our own "common sense" - no mask for me in the supermarket thank you very much! But Constellations reminds us that at the subatomic level we're just energy states that jump about randomly. Sure enough, blown up into big ol' human beings, we never lose that underlying random bouncing from one energy state to another. Life is indeed what happens when you're making other plans.

Constellations is at the Vaudeville Theatre until 12 September.

Photo Marc Brenner