Constellations, review: subtly profound, beautifully designed study of life's infinite possibilities

In a striking gesture in this revival at the Vaudeville Theatre, Nick Payne’s celebrated play Constellations reimagines its characters with four different pairs of actors to expand its central premise which, as quantum cosmologist Marianne puts it to beekeeper Roland, is: “Every choice, every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”

Constellations returned last month with the two casts of Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah, and Zo? Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. Now, it’s the turn of Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, and Anna Maxwell-Martin and Chris O’Dowd’s to bring a plurality of bodies – refracted through new lenses of race, class, sexuality and age – to Marianne and Roland’s tragic-comic love story.

It’s a testament to Payne’s nimble, protean writing and Michael Longhurst’s taut, electrifying direction that this endeavour smartly sidesteps gimmicky incursions into mawkish Richard Curtis territory. It’s got one eye on challenging the assumptions of societal bias too – the unchecked gasps that rippled through the audience when Maxwell Martin, playing Marianne in her forties, tells Roland her lover is 24 years old were indicative of that.

The play, which premiered at the Royal Court in 2012 starring Sally Hawkins and Rafe Spall, flits through multiple permutations of the milestone events in Marianne and Roland’s entire relationship – from meeting at a barbecue to the headiness of new romance through betrayal, recriminations, reunion, and on to a reckoning with mortality. In fragmented scenes that repeat and circle back on themselves in a non-linear narrative, Payne explores the infinite choices that two people might make in a relationship. In the process, it’s about many other things too: free will, fate, loyalty, memory and how we experience the ephemerality of time which, as Marianne says is “irrelevant at the level of atoms and molecules”.

Designer Tom Scutt’s brilliantly conceived thicket of different-sized helium balloons crowding around and above the actors initially feels like an impenetrably abstract visual metaphor. But, as the action snaps and crackles along, they start to fall, representing the choices not made. Sometimes they’re like Marianne’s atoms and molecules, and sometimes they resemble creepy, intergalactic beings. Gathered en masse, and lit by Lee Curran’s colour washes to suggest heft, the balloons also morph into lobes of the brain.

In a particularly heart-rending moment, static blue light flares from them, dramatising the misfiring of Maxwell Martin’s Marianne’s synapses as she loses her capacity for language when the brain tumour takes hold. It’s made all the more visceral by sound designer David McSeveney’s shock bursts of dissonant buzz and crackle.

A major part of the pull of seeing two stagings of Constellations on the same day is the difference between each cast - in that respect, the play also subtextually dramatises the infinity of choices that govern how a play is realised on stage. Douglas and Tovey’s kinetic performances have the edge here. They share a naturally playful, even-handed chemistry that breezes adroitly through razor-sharp comic timing and the abrupt changes of scene that dramatise Payne’s stage direction in the script “an indented rule indicates a change in universe”. Tovey’s rap-inflected romantic monologue about the sex life of bees is truly something special to experience.

In contrast, Maxwell Martin and O’Dowd, who are seasoned, big-name actors, initially seemed oddly stiff and static – perhaps more a case of first-night jitters than any lack of preparedness. Once they got into their stride, however, their portrayals of a brusquely fiery Marianne and awkwardly protective Roland made their rendition the sweetest yet.

It’s astonishing how much quality drama Payne manages to capture in just 75 minutes. This makes Constellations a demanding play to watch but, much like those helium balloons, it carries the profundity of its weighty topics lightly.

Until Sept 12. 0330 333 4814; nimaxtheatres.com