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| ID: Aubrey McCance and Tatiana Kneale. Credit: Valerie Creasy. |
Anyway we (me and the teddy bear) are in the Barron at the Byre, excitingly set up in the traverse, which almost magically makes you feel more involved in everything going on. The set consists of two stage blocks alienatingly far off on one side, which get moved around in all sorts of evocative ways (I’m a total sucker for this stuff), and overhead are enormous strings of fairy lights. Constellations! They turn off.
Aubrey McCance (Roland) is next to the stage blocks, and Tatiana Kneale (Marianne) walks up to him quickly nervously excitedly reciting how humans can’t lick the tips of their elbows because they hide the secret to immortality and if everyone could lick them there’d be chaos because you can’t just go on living and living and living; however, Roland’s in a relationship so BRRRRT (SFX by Annalise Roberts) she repeats the line; now Roland’s just come out of a serious relationship so BRRRRT now he’s married so BRRRRT. Tatiana gets increasingly annoyed and forceful and forward until Aubrey, dumbfounded, tries to lick his elbow, and a conversation begins: Marianne’s a theoretical physicist; Roland’s a beekeeper; Marianne doesn’t quite know how you could make a living as a beekeeper.
An hour and a half later Dylan Swain (Roland) is next to the stage blocks (now intimately centre stage), and Callum Wardman-Browne (Martin) walks up less far to him, and much more casually talks about how humans can’t lick the tips of their elbows because there’d be chaos because you can’t just keep on living and living and living; however, Roland’s in a relationship so BRRRRT BRRRRT a few repeats after they’re sitting facing away from each other on the stage blocks and Dylan is turning around smiling very very close now but then suddenly jumps away, shocked at himself; he has a wife so BRRRRT.
What’s happening here? The script advertises these as being different possible worlds (you have to have a gimmick). 4 days ago Aidan tells me “parallel worlds is almost uniquely in my brain a 2010s thing. It's a very tired Rick and Morty type of trope. [...] People could be laughing at the repetition of the thing [...] but I think after a while the joke exhausts itself and I think we will have done our job correctly if people take it seriously, as the play takes it very seriously. I think this play sets itself apart in terms of the possible worlds thing because it is not necessarily literal. It could very much be a metaphor”. It’s “the explainable supernatural [...] you have a central gimmick and then come the end of the closing act that is something that people can intellectually justify because of some kind of event” (you have to have a gimmick). My initial reaction was: in 2025 (or 2012, when this was written) do we really have to thinly paper misunderstood pop science all over our fiction to make it seem like it could be real? Are we not allowed to just have a play exploring different variations of might-have-been?
The metaphor explanation is that Marianne/Martin develops brain cancer (spoilers! I don’t think it’s possible to talk about the play without acknowledging this): interspersed with different possible breakups and breakdowns and a few reconciliations are scenes lit in blue with the fairy lights on where, standing solitary and very still, Tatiana with a trembling voice and shuddering breaths, and Callum with halting self-restraint, talk with great physical difficulty about the horror of losing control of speech, of writing, of memory, of everything that defined their identity; of watching their mother die a slow and painful death with no control. Back in the past – drunk and kissing Roland for the first time – they grapple with free will, Callum flirtatiously and half-jokingly explaining the physics, Tatiana as if driven from within talking about how the possible infinitude of possible worlds is maybe the only way to believe that our choices matter, or (in a different world) that free will is an illusion since we’re all just particles. Aubrey, uncomprehending, sincere, and horny, replies ‘you make it sound so glamorous’.
The best of the play’s repeated lines, “then what’s the point”, “we can go abroad”, “their lives are often intensely short”, “there’s no linear explanation”, “we’re just particles”, build up new meanings over time, moving towards one question with only two answers: is it better to die sooner in control, or later in pain? Both decisions are shown, but their consequences are not. I, and perhaps most of us who have ever lost anyone, have strong opinions and stronger emotions towards this issue. It is universally relevant. The supreme pain and indignity of dying slowly in a hospital or a hospice may be beyond easy emotional understanding, but it is not beyond rational understanding, and the strongest parts of this play are when it approaches saying something about the act of dying – Tatiana’s grim levity and Callum’s genuine anger at cultural romanticisation of dying and the dead, and Aubrey and Dylan’s well-meaning sentimental attachment to it – but it does not approach it closely or sensitively enough. Maybe it’s impossible for a play performed by university students to approach it closely or sensitively enough.
So anyway what’s the point of writing or performing a play with so many different repetitions of every scene? To explore all the possibilities: to gesture at every way things could have been and force you the audience to compare them and extract from them some human truth. This production is a double bill, which extends this possibility-exploration to the production process itself: Aidan talks about repetition and Meisner and Uta Hagen, and ‘finding new truth in the exact same words’. He says of directing two casts for the same play ‘you get to do all of the things that you have to kill when you're doing a single production process. You can do them. You can do two radically different things that both appeal in the moment’.
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| ID: Dylan Swain and Callum Wardman-Browne. Credit: Valerie Creasy. |
We’ve just talked about characters, and continuities in performance. Most of the play is structured around scenes moving through different failures toward a final ‘successful’ (continuing the relationship) answer, then going chronologically onto the next relationship break point. This gets a little tiring, but also importantly it really draws a single line of continuity across versions. The blocking and the acting also repeatedly assert continuities. The couple meet, and eventually possibly reconcile, at a ballroom class – through the different versions they move closer together and the lights also close in, until each final progression towards reconciliation is dramatically lit from a different angle by a different single lighting fixture (lighting courtesy of Willa Meloth). What is this trying to say?
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| ID: Aubrey McCance and Tatiana Kneale. Credit: Valerie Creasy. |
We are also philosophically opposed to this idea of through-lines. It is admittedly in the nature of most plays to have continuous characters with roughly consistent beliefs. It is also in our nature as humans to imagine others and ourselves as continuous characters. But doesn’t the possible worlds gimmick blow that all up? Why should any of the scenes in this play (or any play) be from the same universe? What I’m gesturing towards is that I didn’t get a strong sense of what Marianne/Martin and Roland are like as continuous characters, and that’s because they aren’t – they’re rough guidelines (Marianne/Martin is a theoretical physicist and proud and scared; Roland is a beekeeper and obsessed with material realities) and each version is a different person with a different history within those guidelines, about whom we otherwise know nothing.
This makes the play a challenging acting exercise – Dylan says ‘There's a lot more internal preparation as an actor that goes into this play than any other play I've done because we're constantly resetting with new stakes and new backgrounds’ – these are skilled and experienced actors, and they are often very compelling at differentiating the versions, but also occasionally veer off into jarringly unbelievable exaggerated emotion or humour. We can look beyond an acting exercise though – how true is it that we ourselves are continuous characters? Perhaps particularly as a trans person I’ve always really struggled with having any sense of continuous identity or continuous personhood. I don’t see much in common with the person I was 10 years ago, or 2 years ago, or 1, or last month, or 2 days ago. Who knows the person I'll be tomorrow? As Marianne/Martin says, we’re all just particles. We’re lumps of meat and blood and nerve cells, even if I can't emotionally convince myself of it; it’s undeniable that that meat and blood nerve cells develop patterns in the ways they react to things, but does that really constitute an identity? Eventually they’ll all break down. Does that matter?
I don’t like the ending of this play (SPOILERS! THIS IS THE SPOILERS PARAGRAPH!). Marianne/Martin desperately tries to express themself a final time to a Roland unwilling to listen in across many possible worlds: ‘the basic laws of physics don’t have a past and a present. Time is irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules [...] You’ll still have all our time [...] There’s not going to be any more or less of it’. This is all acted extremely movingly by each cast, Tatiana and Aubrey going from frantic emotion to calmly holding hands on top of a stage block as the multiverse shakes around them, and Callum and Dylan sitting back to back – so it’s a pity the speech itself is so trite and undermines the whole choice about determining your own time and way of dying. Finally we go back in the chronology, back to a ballroom potential reconciliation: both couples come on and alternate saying the lines. Maybe they get together afterwards or maybe they don’t. On a surface level this is moving. But what is it trying to say?
Constellations is a Science Play, a poorly-defined genre that tends to bounce off scientific theories to gesture at some ineffable truth of human existence. Aidan says ‘There is a strange way that these contrasts of objectivity and intense emotionality can find a middle ground in these plays. In almost a dialectical way they find this kind of synthesis come the end of the play, thematically and in terms of character psychology and emotions, especially the relationship that we have to these things, like theoretical physics and quantum mechanics, which shouldn't necessarily stir emotions in anyone. But when you're facing into vastness and oblivion, then all of that can have severe emotional repercussions for people who are caught in the centre of these things’. Is the synthesis of this play then an assertion of a universal emotion of human love across universes, or that you should exalt in the magical uncertainty of each moment, or that humans in the same situations exist all over time and space and possible worlds, even though you can only experience your one right now? – because those are the possible assertions that I can derive from the parallel worlds gimmick and the ending, and I don’t like any of them one bit. Isn’t it more powerful to just rest with the best speech in the play, repeated interspersed with the happy beginnings of the relationship by an uncannily still and terrified staring at you Callum or Tatiana struggling against the eating away of their brain, blindly reaching towards an idea of the soul they would rationally reject when confronted with the horror of the end of their entirely physical existence?
‘Before people had face [...] God. [...] People’s lives were their own. Before it became skin’.
So this is a very good production of a good play, which opens up a lot of important questions which I worry its script does not rise to answer. Its parallel universe gimmick is not as interesting as those, but is also easy to look past, and behind it are some stirring meditations on love and especially death. Is it worth seeing twice? If it's worth seeing once (which it is) then I think it must be.
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