Constellations
Cork Arts Theatre
★★★★☆
In some productions, Nick Payne’s most popular play has been redrawn as a piece for four teams of actors. Here, Constellations keeps the original cast of two, played in this case by Julie Maguire and Aidan Moriarty.
The apparent simplicity of the pairing is the first device in a script based on alternatives. The audience has not only to catch on but also to catch up with a kind of extraterrestrial relevance, a task the wonderfully committed performances both make positively pleasant and, in intellectual terms, relatively convincing.
The play begins with two young people meeting, which is always a good start to a love story. Roland is a beekeeper, Marianne a physicist; their hesitant engagement with each other is resolved mostly through Marianne’s determination to draw Roland into a conversation.
What follows is not, as Marianne herself admits, a linear development of commonplace possibilities. In fact there are too many possibilities, and with each stage of the relationship an intricate web of options is explored. As a physicist she enjoys navigating a vast number of parallel multiverses; as a man involved with the mating habits of bees he finds her musings increasingly arousing.
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But spin the wheel and she’s bored and he’s exhausted. She confesses to an affair with a colleague, identified by Roland as the fellow with the dandruff. They break up. Or they don’t. If they do, they meet again with delight. He proposes marriage; she rejects him. Or she doesn’t.
We’re into the cosmological history of time before we know it and remember briefly that the world wide web was invented at the Cern particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva.
Is it necessary to be aware of any of this to become engrossed in Constellations? Not at all. Maguire and Moriarty bring such ardent conviction to their characters that their own personal web, whatever its ramifications, is what matters.
Their initial stumbling with words and meanings becomes a motif that puts a poignant shape on scenes in which they are incoherent even in sign language. Essentially a matter of intonation, the same phrases are pronounced differently, softened or with an edge, lovingly or enraged, and at least once when there seems no way back to understanding or sympathy.
Altered with permission for this Cork Midsummer Festival staging, which is part of Cork Arts Theatre’s Redirection programme, placenames provide locality. Cork’s Barrack Street comes off badly, but this geography allows Maguire’s gorgeous tone and accent to resonate beyond the text.
Because they are human, and not only molecules or atoms, they allow themselves a lot of fun, but above all Marianne and Roland offer a radiance of hope against all the galactic odds.
As honey is on sale in the foyer, it’s a surprise there are no hives in Aedín Cosgrove’s set of pergola and shrubbery. Lighting by Dara Hoban and sound from Arran Mac Gabhann lift or darken the mood where appropriate.
As director, Al Dalton has ensured a wise endorsement of a fascinating play.
Constellations is at Cork Arts Theatre, as part of Cork Midsummer Festival, until Saturday, June 20th
