Ruth Leon recommends…Constellations – Donmar Warehouse

Constellations – Donmar Warehouse
Click here to rent

Available until 31 January
This was a fascinating theatrical experiment this year that paid off. Nick Payne’s Constellations, a hit play in the West End in 2012, was revived this year with not one, but four different casts. Plays with only two in the cast are known in the theatre as ‘two-handers’ but the twist here was that there were actually four ‘two-handers’, each limited to a run of a few weeks. The four casts were awesome – Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah, Peter Capaldi and Zoë Wanamaker, Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd. Many of us chose to see more than one cast in succession and now we have the opportunity to see all four, online.

The play is written so that the dialogue, often repeated, sometimes ends up in a different place. There is some complicated explanation for this, tied up with physics, but you don’t have to understand it to love the play.
A quantum physicist and a beekeeper meet at a barbeque. They hit it off, or perhaps they don’t. They go home together, or maybe they go their separate ways. In the multiverse, with every possible future ahead of them, a love of honey could make all the difference.

Each of the four shows can be rented for £7.50 to rent and gives audiences access to watch the show for 24 hours after purchase; or you can buy all 4 casts for £20, with extended viewing time.

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