The Stage

Constellations

Published Friday 20 January 2012 at 10:40 by Aleks Sierz

The Royal Court’s 2012 programme starts off in its upstairs studio space with this well-cast two-hander by a young playwright whose previous play at this venue was the bitter-sweet sexual comedy, Wanderlust, some 15 months ago. This time, the subject of love relationships is similar, but the form is radically different.

Sally Hawkins (Marianne) and Rafe Spall (Roland) in Constellations at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London Photo: Tristram Kenton

Marianne and Roland are two young people who meet, are attracted to each other and start a relationship. He is a bee-keeper and she works as a theoretical physicist at Sussex University, a job which enables her to talk about quantum mechanics and the idea of parallel worlds. Prompted by this, Constellations is structured as a series of repeats in which each scene is played several times with variations of mood or outcome.

So on Tom Scutt’s bare, dark platform set, Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall play the repeats in a variety of emotional keys - charmingly tentative, drunkenly funny, deeply sad, excruciatingly embarrassed, heartwarmingly tender. Familiar issues about commitment and infidelity are soon confronted by the more devastating subject of illness and death. The effect is like spending an hour inside the memories and feelings of two people at the same time.

Hawkins and Spall successfully outline this one particular relationship, in all its different facets, but also suggest all other relationships. Spall - who was also in Nick Payne’s 2009 play If There Is I Haven’t Found It Yet - uses his charming nerdish gaucheness to great effect, but balances this with moments of deep seriousness, while Hawkins ranges over the territory between drunken frankness to the barely comprehensible devastation of loss. Michael Longhurst’s surefooted production is both entertaining and deeply moving.