Review: Constellations (Merton Arts Centre)

Review by Liam O’Dell

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Before Doctor Strange dabbled in the multiverse in The Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home, playwright Nick Payne imagined the many futures a couple could experience in Constellations. Bagging the Olivier Award for Best Revival in 2022 when four different acting duos played the two lovers at the Vaudeville Theatre, the play is revived once again in a deaf/hard-of-hearing production featuring British Sign Language (BSL) - but will the stars align for this bilingual retelling?

The 90-minute play follows beekeeper Roland (Stephen Collins) and physicist Marianne (Kitty Devlin) down every possible path their romance could take. We see both the successful and unsuccessful first moves, marriage proposals and more in a charming and entertaining look at the human experience.

This particular staging marks the first piece of theatre created by Hear Art - the deaf-led arts organisation which has produced a string of short films and podcasts - and the directorial debut of actor Charlotte Arrowsmith. Rather than transition between different outcomes with a bland change of lighting, Arrowsmith’s direction has the two actors contort and worm their way into the next possibility, from the opening move of a waltz to the rubbing of elbows, in a brilliant callback to the opening scene. If time and space really is “wibbly wobbly”, as a certain time-travelling time lord would have us believe, then the movement direction represents it well.

In fact, while talk of parallel universes, string theory, quantum mechanics and particle physics may not be the easiest to wrap our heads around, there is something about British Sign Language (BSL) - in requiring signs to capture the essence of a word or an idea - which makes these otherwise daunting scientific theories and topics accessible to a general audience. Devlin’s enthusiasm while explaining all of this to us is endearing, which makes things all the more heartbreaking when that excitable energy fades away at the arrival of bad news - bad news which also highlights Collins’ charming performance as the gentle and caring Roland.

Marianne and Roland have great chemistry - so do Devlin and Collins - and this seems to be reflected in a clever design decision in the captions display (co-created by Virgine Taylor and Ben Glover), as the two characters’ lines appear in the complementary colours of yellow and purple. This is only the case for some of the scenes, though, as others see the captions switch to yellow and white without a clear reason for doing so.

My initial thought was that it might be a way of indicating parallel universes where Roland and Marianne choose to sign, and those where they opt for signing and speaking with English grammar (also known as Sign Supported English), as if there are endless versions of deaf communication, but there’s no such pattern or consistency. When Constellations is about the multiverse and infinite possibilities, alternating between just two different colour sets for the captions feels limiting. One set for readability is enough, but if there must be more, then they should serve a purpose, with a clear connection to the action unfolding beneath them. 

Dots must be joined, if you will, even when this particular romance is told in a way which doesn’t follow a linear narrative from A to B (or bees?) With an imaginative use of BSL alongside English, and two delicate and emotional performances, this version of Constellations is unlike any love story you’ll have seen before - in this lifetime and the

next one.

Constellations played at Merton Arts Centre until 20th September