By BRUCE DENNILL
Constellations / Directed by Jay Pather / Theatre On The Square, Sandton, Johannesburg
Nick Payne’s Constellations is a play that asks its audience to forgive him and his characters the conceit of repeating themselves – sometimes several times over. It’s not a mechanism to help actors remember their lines, but rather to add nuance on nuance to carefully chosen moments on which a relationship can hinge or pivot.
How the idea plays out on stage is that the two actors – Mwenya Kabwe as Marianne and Mark Elderkin as Roland – spend much of the piece speaking and receiving the same pieces of dialogue with different inflections, altered body language or varied positioning, all of which slightly changes the meaning and processing of exactly the same words for both the characters and the audience. It’s not a ‘Sliding Doors’ type mechanism, where a character choosing a different path completely alters where the story goes from the moment. Rather, it’s a workshop in suggestion, leaving the possibility of diverse outcomes to be digested as the story is taken forward into the next new scene.
Part of what makes this production work particularly well is the combination of casting and acting excellence that makes Kabwe and Elderkin feel normal and relatable. She’s a cosmologist, hence the play’s title – via her explanation of quantum mechanics and string theory and the rest meaning that several versions of their story as people and as a couple could or do exist at the same time – while he’s a beekeeper. Neither is a common vocation, but their relative exoticness (and how mismatched they feel) doesn’t make either character difficult to connect with, thanks to Roland’s sensible groundedness and Marianne’s endearing curiosity.
Within this odd but effective outline, the acting and direction is superb, keeping in mind that the action in the play often looks, fascinatingly, like actors trying a different approach to a scene to see what would happen – even as the acting is so good that it doesn’t feel like acting (if that makes sense). The chemistry between Kabwe and Elderkin is beautiful and layered, whichever option on a specific interaction they are working on at the time. Whether they are cheerful and flirty or weighed down by challenging circumstances, it feels simultaneously like they are invested and involved, with Payne’s writing, again, making this relationship accurately (if dramatically) reflect the complexities of real-life relationships – or at least those that treat having a partner as more important than just an outlet for some or other desire, online dating-style.
This is a piece that demands a lot from its actors in scenarios where not a lot happens – two people stand or sit and talk, repeatedly, about a range of facets of their lives – and Kabwe and Elderkin, corralled by Pather, concoct something that is both rich and subtle, allowing each audience member to leave the theatre with a slightly different take on what they’ve just witnessed, making for a satisfying extra act post-show as folks have a drink and chat about their experience.