Constellations
Vaudeville Theatre, London

Boy meets girl is a scenario as old as the Garden of Eden and can seed happy or unhappy endings. Beginning with Marianne, an astrophysicist, introducing herself to Roland, a beekeeper, at a social event, Nick Payne’s 2012 Constellations is unusual in giving the characters multiple outcomes, ranging from long and short lifetimes together to an involvement that stops with that initial conversation.

Each short scene is repeated several times (one having nine versions), some varying only by a word, intonation, gesture or movement, others featuring life-changing decisions going different ways. Each alteration – as small as a changed stress on a line – can have vastly different consequences: romantic, professional, existential.