Thanks to Marvel movies and the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once, we’re all a little bit more familiar with the concept of the ‘multiverse’ than we were about a decade ago, when British writer Nick Payne’s two-hander was first staged in Sydney.
Compact and beautifully made, Constellations is made up of moments between two people, Roland and Marianne. He’s a beekeeper, she’s a cosmologist. Their worlds collide at a mutual friend’s barbecue.
But this isn’t your standard apiarist meets scientist rom-com. In Constellations, Payne gives us multiple versions of that first encounter. In some, Roland and Marianne connect. In others, they glance off each other – uninterested in romance or otherwise engaged.
So begins a series of partial (and occasionally more substantial) vignettes representing the infinite possibilities of love afforded (theoretically) in a multiverse in which, Marianne helpfully explains: “every decision you’ve ever and never made exists in an unimaginably vast ensemble of parallel universes.”
How’s your quantum mechanics? Your string theory? Can’t be more basic than mine (which is mostly harvested from Dr Strange, I have to admit). Happily, you...
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