Review: CONSTELLATIONS at Baxter Theatre Studio

Nick Payne's CONSTELLATIONS tells a love story like a memory: not in sequence, but in fragments, with the same moments revisited, refracted and reimagined. Director Jay Pather builds the Baxter Theatre Studio production around this quality with real intelligence.

Wolf Britz’s production design strips everything back to two performers and two mirrored, triangle-based prisms that glide silently around the bare stage, acting as furniture in one scene and barriers in the next. Like a tangram puzzle, the same two shapes reconfigure into entirely different pictures. The relationship between Roland and Marianne operates the same way: the same two people with the same emotional vocabulary are assembled and reassembled until the audience finds themselves making their own version of the story. It’s a "choose your own adventure" love story. This feeling is aided by the mirrored surfaces scattering light across the stage like fragments of a disco ball while Karen Logan’s abstract and nebulous projections on the back wall give texture to what the characters can't quite say aloud.

The lighting does clear, specific work within the play: signaling the move into a new episode versus a shift into a new version of the same one. This is the grammatical work of the production and it’s done admirably well.

Mwenya Kabwe and Mark Elderkin are convincing as two people with a history, or rather several alternative ones. What they do particularly well is modulate that connection: warm and alive in one version of a scene, then deliberately cool or frozen in the next, depending on which dimension we've entered. It's technically demanding and they make it look easy, which makes for riveting theatre. The audience around me was clearly invested and drawn in enough to feel, as the play intends, like participants rather than spectators. At one point, the woman behind me murmured to her friend: "Aaw, I want to clap." She wasn't the only one.

Payne's writing is clever and disarmingly real. Sentences trail off, people mishear or misspeak things, they talk past each other, they repeat themselves. The humour, of which there is a lot, appears in several dimensions too: the satisfaction of an audience that thinks it knows what's coming next, the occasional actual joke, the awkwardness of two uncertain people, and the slightly vertiginous comedy of characters who are themselves aware they exist in a space of infinite possibility. It's funny because it’s true.

The ending (or endings, rather) landed harder than I expected. I will give no spoilers, but the production has found a staging solution for the play's final exchanges that is quietly devastating. Bring tissues. You have been warned.

CONSTELLATIONS is on at the Baxter Theatre Studio until 20 June then runs at the Theatre on the Square in Johannesburg from 23 June to 11 July. Tickets from R250 from Webtickets. Don't miss it.