Constellations: A Play

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It’s astonishing how much quality drama Payne manages to capture in just 75 minutes. This makes Constellations a demanding play to watch but, much like those helium balloons, it carries the profundity of its weighty topics lightly. Richard Wherrett Fellow Ian Michael will make his STC directorial debut with this beautiful new production starring Johnny Carr and Catherine Văn-Davies ( Playing Beatie Bow). Constellations is set to be a captivating and intimate night of theatre for anybody who’s ever wondered about the road untravelled or the opportunity unseized.

Climate change is going to destroy the planet, yet I can understand why it's not an issue," Payne says. "If something I do now won't have an impact for 50 years, the problem just is not immediate enough for people to feel they ought to act. I think we're all doomed." It pains him that, because of the New York production of If There Is I Haven't Found It Yet, he's had to fly to the US five times this year, breaking a self-imposed five-year ban on air travel. To compensate, on the advice of a climate change specialist he met there, he offset his carbon emissions by becoming vegetarian. As heartrending as it is splendid, Constellations tells the story of beekeeper Roland, and quantum physicist Marianne: two (literally) star-crossed lovers whose relationship we see in a series of different ‘what if?’ variations – their joy and heartbreak, their laughter and quarrels, their break-ups and make-ups. The result is a rich, compelling and sensitive love story that reflects on the power of human connection in a seemingly random universe.

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In November 2015, the Chinese-language premiere was directed and translated by Wang Chong in Beijing. He used 13 on stage cameras to conceptualize the play into a "stage movie" with the 50 scenes presented in 50 takes creating a very intimate cinematic experience. A real hamster was also on the stage representing the god of time and universe dictating the cuts of the "movie" and the possibilities of life. Because of the show's success, the actress Wang Xiaohuan was recognised by The Beijing News as The Young Theater Artist of the Year. [20] In November 2023, the play was performed in Amsterdam by Downstage Left at the Polanentheater. [21] Publication [ edit ] Some historians argue that many of the myths associated with the constellations were invented specifically to help farmers construct an accurate understanding of the sky. From ancient times farmers knew that for most crops, you plant in the spring and harvest in the autumn. Therefore, by ensuring the planting took place at the correct time the risk of a failed harvest was kept to a minimum, particularly in regions where the differentiation between the seasons was slight.

The play premiered in Los Angeles at the Geffen Playhouse with Ginnifer Goodwin and Allen Leech and director Giovanna Sardelli. [19] When Ptolemy conceived their patterns the stars were thought to be equidistant from the Earth; this model was developed from Aristotle's conception of crystalline spheres on which the stars (and planets) rotated around a central Earth. So, the idea of a relationship between groups of stars would have been a realistic assumption. The constellations in early culturesConstellations returned last month with the two casts of Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah, and Zoë Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. Now, it’s the turn of Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, and Anna Maxwell-Martin and Chris O’Dowd’s to bring a plurality of bodies – refracted through new lenses of race, class, sexuality and age – to Marianne and Roland’s tragic-comic love story. Constellations is about the meeting of, and blossoming relationship between, beekeeper Roland and cosmologist Marianne. The latter muses on scientific ideas such as string theory, quantum mechanics and multiple universes, which is interpreted by Payne in the play’s structure as there being infinite possibilities for how your life might go. That means some scenes are played out again, but end in a different way; there isn’t one set direction of travel, and the audience has to figure out the various threads.