Constellations a fizzy multiverse romance made sweeter by chemistry of two leads

Constellations

The Winter Players
KC Arts Centre
April 2, 7.30pm

There is a honey-sweet forthrightness to this play by British playwright Nick Payne, bringing to mind the enduring warmth of a good old-fashioned love drama.

In its disinterest in political commentary and social satire, it recalls a simpler, more weightless time when the play premiered – before high oil prices, United States President Donald Trump and the omnipresence of artificial intelligence.

In 2012, audiences might have been given the runaround by Payne’s nerdy expositions on the multiverse, since turned commonplace by the Avengers films and the Oscar-winning Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022).

Constellations, adapted by young theatre collective The Winter Players, must now be appreciated through this mature, more disillusioned lens, yet its raw emotional power is undeniable.

It is very fun – and, in fact, refreshingly analogue – to watch multiple realities play out within seconds on stage. This is a time-capsule scientific experiment that co-directors Marwyn Ho and Michaela Leong wryly play into, amplifying the vibe with a suspended retro-television that breaks out into static and documentary clips of animals mating.

Juliana Kassim Chan is physicist Marianne. And Ho is beekeeper Roland, who repeat the same sequences of their meet-cute, betrayal, proposal and fights in quick-fire succession. They adopt modulated inflexions and body postures to different results.

Smartly, characters sometimes walk across the stage to redeliver a line with the other side of their profile visible to the audience, tiny glitches that feed into the sense of unpredictable chance and all the ways things have to line up for a particular result to happen.

This must be a nightmare to perform and, in theory, could have felt like a rehearsal room exercise. But Chan and Ho never let it become anything so exploratory and uncertain. There is practised precision and still easy lightness in their interactions; a few too-mannered pauses by Ho early on quickly settle into something much more naturalistic and compelling.

Ho more generally leans into a lumberingness and Chan is more playful and completely charming with small gestures and private asides. None of this is a subversion of heteronormative dynamics by any measure, but it feels more genuine and refreshing, Chan and Ho expertly allowing their fizzy chemistry to develop and be reeled back across achronological sequences.

A series of ominous scenes, when both have to come to terms with a medical diagnosis, hits the spot. And Ho has a selfish, but also helpless, outburst that shows off the actor’s talent for the self-destructive combination of rage and tears.  

Of course, Payne, in evoking the multiverse, has also used a sleight of hand here, picking combinations that ultimately all cluster around a central storyline instead of allowing it to spiral out of control. Within this linearity, the small shifts and same dialogue birth a rich emotional landscape of subtle variance.

The true multiverse lies in the sophistication of human feelings which, thankfully, has survived and only become more important in the intervening 14 years since this play was first staged. This is a sweetly sincere production performed with unselfconscious levity and lingering sadness. 

Book it/Constellations

Where: KC Arts Centre – Home of SRT, 20 Merbau Road
When: April 3 and 4, 7.30pm; April 5, 2.30 and 7.30pm
Admission: $27 and $32; eligible for SG Culture Pass
Info: str.sg/eSsB