Constellations: The Duke of York's Theatre, London

The unpredictability of outcome that is — or at any rate was — a defining feature of quantum mechanics, supplies the impetus to the plot of Nick Payne’s beguiling two-hander Constellations. A big hit at the Royal Court earlier in the year, the play follows two other successes from that venue — Laura Wade’s Bullingdon Club mickey-take Posh and April De Angelis’s well-observed family drama Jumpy — into the Duke of York’s Theatre. Frankly, it seems somewhat modest fare for this prestigious West End venue. A heart-tugging, even mawkish, tale of love and potential loss is dressed up during the mere 70 minutes of the action to seem something more significant through the application of science. Like Tom Stopp-ard and Michael Frayn before him, Payne clearly recognises there is nothing quite like a spot of cutting-edge phy-sics to lend intellectual gravitas to one’s writing. The story starts with a meeting at a barbecue between a cheery beekeeper, as we don’t then know him to be, called Roland (an unlikely name, surely, for one so young) and a pert and appealing woman, Marianne, who is eventually revealed to be an astrophysicist. The pair bec-ome an item. Or do they? Certain-ly so in one version of the story we see in the staccato scenes played out, with great technical skill, by the well-matched Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, under the direction of Michael Longhurst. In another, a potential romance is torpedoed from the outset because Roland is already married. What we see, as their association is examined in episodes repeated over and over again with subtle and entertaining variation, is what might have happened to the couple in the myriad possible universes that make up what physicists call the ‘multiverse’. Theatregoers can read all about this, and bee-keeping, too, in the programme, and some might feel rather pleased with themselves for becoming so well informed. But what is added to the play through this scientific conceit never becomes obvious.