By Anne-Louise Fortune
The video for ‘Don’t Delete The Kisses’ by Wolf Alice features a couple on various forms of London Transport. Sometimes they’re in love, sometimes they’re fighting. The same moments cycle around, the same physical interactions, but with different outfits or hairstyles. It’s all very Sliding Doors.
That Constellations uses Wolf Alice’s song as the music which bookends the performance presumably means that the premise of the show draws on this idea of ‘what if?’, and extends it to an hour-long production.
Marianne (Chloe Gatling), and Roland (Zak Cartney), meet at a barbecue. He’s in a long-term relationship. We jump to another universe; they meet at a barbecue, and he’s just out of a long-term relationship. We jump again; he’s single, and they talk more. And so we continue, jumping between universes, as Marianne and Roland have the same beginnings of conversations but different ends.
Roland is a beekeeper. Bees live short and intense lives – every member of the hive has a predetermined role in bee society. It’s clinical. It’s foreseeable. It’s observable. Marianne is a scientist. She sees possibilities but also believes in the rules of physics, which tell her that all the time we have had already happened – we’re just not seeing it that way.
Writer Nick Payne has weaved an intricate dialogue in which all universes seem to end up in the same place. The quick burst snippets of conversations can be disconcerting initially until you understand the premise. Then the piece becomes a poem, a dance, a riddle. It’s utterly captivating, and Gatling and Cartney are to be commended for imbuing each iteration of a scene that had identical dialogue with different emphases, creating different meanings.
The play questions the concept of free will. Can we ever choose our own destiny, or has the end already been determined? Are two people destined to be together, no matter what?
That Wolf Alice tune is a clever choice – but it’s also a double-edged sword. The song has also been used in Season One of Heartstopper, which potentially imbues the play with a different meaning for some, given the song’s use within that programme. The piece can also feel overly long – whilst the idea is a clever one, the repetition can become too much at times – too many universes, not enough plot.
Overall, however, this is a solid piece of theatre, giving the audience pause to consider how some of the more miserable aspects of the human experience seem to be inescapable.
Constellations continues at the Edinburgh Fringe until August 26th, on even-numbered days only.
