It's in the stars

Constellations
(Lowry Quays, to Saturday)

ONCE in a while a writer gets an idea for a play that just clicks, both for himself and for the audience - though not so much for quantum physics or beekeeping...

Nick Payne mixes things up good and proper in this wonderful, 75 minute flash of brilliance, in which a quantum physicist meets a beekeeper and, well, neither career really has much bearing on what happens next. 

His job gives him an appreciation of lives lived at full speed - bees live only a few months but pack in a lot; her career gives her the theoretical notion that everything that ever happened or will ever happen, is happening right now in an infinite number of parallel universes, the “multiverse”. 

Cue Payne’s smartly, funnily, intricately-written play, which shows us a multitude of scene options from the lives of Roland and Marianne - the understated but wonderful Joe Armstrong, son of actor Alun; and the utterly charming Louise Brealey, best known as Holmes’ would-be girlfriend from “Sherlock”.

Payne writes their life together as a series of possibilities: snippets of dialogue performed then rewound, often more than once, slightly changing mood and emphasis each time to show how even minor differences can have devastating effect.

So they meet, meet again, live together, don’t live together, split up, stay together, meet up again and so on, to a conclusion that becomes inevitable, despite several changes of emphasis so varied that the evening at times resembles an acting master class. Which in some ways it is.

Along the course of this relationship - for despite the talk of infinite universes, this is at heart a simple relationship drama - Payne throws in non-linear scenes: they make sense when we first see them, but when repeated later often make even more sense, and bring poignant tragedy with them.

This is not to say this supersmart, touching work is complicated or requires a science degree. Far from it: when the physics and the beekeeping are stripped away, what Payne has achieved is a remarkably direct, honest, multi-faceted look at a pair of lives. Though we hear of parallel, infinite universes, we all live just one. Bees know that from day one.