[attach id=253608 size="medium"]Maria Pia Meli and Nathan Brimmer paint a vivid picture in Constellations.[/attach]
It was brave of WhatsTheirNames Theatre, a new group composed of young performers, to choose to perform Constellations by Nick Payne.
An intriguing play, very successfully received in Britain and, I think, also in the US.
It belongs to the school of theatre in which a science concept is not just part of the subject of a play but also informs the very structure of the play itself. Plays like Tom Stoppard’s wonderful Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy come to mind.
In Constellations, Payne uses the multiverse theory to dramatically depict the relationship between Marianne, a cosmologist in a British University, and Ronald, a professional beekeeper, from its opening moments.
A very mature performance, one that cannot fail to move
The story takes us through its times of happiness, angry separation, reunion and approach to a dark end.
At one point, Marianne explains to Ronald how string theory potentially covers the gap between Einstein’s relativity theory on the one hand and quantum mechanics, which deals with atoms and molecules, on the other.
She adds that a by-product of string theories is the possibility that humans are all part of a multiverse, and that “in a quantum multiverse, every choice, every decision you have ever or never made, exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes”.
Payne illustrates this by showing the two characters going through important episodes of their relationship again and again, each time with minor or more important differences according to the universe they are inhabiting at that point. In his direction of this 70-minute, one-act play, Philip Leone Ganado heralds the change to a different universe with a loud, twanging noise.
The script itself shows the audience that even at the beginning of the relationship, the episodes the audience will see happening in what we would call the normal chronological sequence already exist in a parallel universe.
Thus, Marianne’s agonising over the serious illness that will cover the last third or so of the play is predicted to the audience (in pre-recorded form), which is temporarily puzzled and will reach comprehension much later on.
The sequence of events seen by the audience is a random sequence. This is something that is understood late in the play, which ends with a repetition of the hopefully joyful scene in which the two make a serious beginning to their relationship. This scene is immediately followed by the play’s most serious scene, which it would be unfair of me to describe.
This multiverse is godless and, ultimately, meaningless. If free will is not entirely ruled out, it is not so much people’s choice as probability that seems to dictate which of the versions in all the universes will ultimately bear fruit.
The performance is enacted on a platform in a fairly small space, with the audience seated on three sides, and the performers never more than a few feet from it. This spatial intimacy gives the two actors the ability to project their emotions with an intensity that would have been much more difficult in a normal theatre.
Every small expression on the face of Nathan Brimmer and Maria Pia Meli registered on the audience and made an impact.
On the other hand, Leone Ganado failed to restrain Brimmer, who has a big voice that sometimes boomed and made his words less comprehensible in this space. Meli rarely had this problem, though even with her there were times, early in the production, where mezzo forte would have been more effective.
Both Brimmer and Meli (the latter is new to me onstage) are very talented actors whom I look forward to seeing in other productions. However, Leone Ganado has not elicited from them all those subtle variations needed to distinguish clearly between the different versions of many scenes.
This is most particularly in the first half or so of the play. I suspect he could have helped them by creating a greater variety of physical positions vis-à-vis each other.
A good example of this comes to my mind regarding the three versions of the scene where Ronald proposes marriage to Marianne. The proposal happens after having solemnly read out an account of the life and activities of bees, which he admires for their simplicity of life and utter single-mindedness of purpose.
He approaches Marianne diagonally from the left and does little to vary the three versions, whereas Marianne’s reaction is clearly different each time. Why does this happen, in dramatic terms? The production does not try to provide a good answer.
All this notwithstanding, the general picture left by the two is a vivid one. Brimmer’s Ronald is no lover boy but a practical man who just happens to fall desperately in love. We cannot but believe in his sincerity and when towards the end he says, unsentimentally but with deep feeling, that he longs to be with Marianne as long as can be. We are with him as much as we are with Romeo at the end of Shakespeare’s great play.
Meli produces, as she needs to do, a more varied physical performance than Brimmer, bringing out the character’s yearning to live a full life in a loving relationship, and later to face up to the disease that appears to be cutting short her days.
Leone Ganado’s repeated use of projected images, especially those of the human brain, grimly emphasises the fact that overshadows even the most ardent loving relationship.
Constellations runs today at The Splendid, Strait Street, Valletta. For tickets, e-mail whatstheirnames.theatre@gmail.com or call 7734 5207.