In Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse, various characters ruminate over a poetic refrain: “All the lives we ever lived / And all the lives to be / Are full of trees and changing leaves…”
The words come from a poem by Charles Elton, which would be published in its original form only about two decades later. Woolf — or her husband, Leonard, or one of their friends — had partially misremembered the phrasing. Elton actually wrote about “waving leaves”, but Woolf’s version better fits her theme, recalling the unavoidable cycle of growth, ageing, death and renewal even as the lines affirm life’s infinite possible iterations.
All the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be: while this could convey ideas of reincarnation or the parallel universes of quantum theory, the mood is one of longing and regret, an acknowledgement of how often we dwell on unreliable memories of the past and yearn for unrealisable alternatives.
Woolf’s citation of Elton’s poem came vividly to mind as I watched Constellations (at Theatre on the Square in Sandton until July 11). The play, written by Nick Payne, was widely acclaimed when it premiered in London in 2012 and has been performed around the globe in numerous languages. It is directed in this How Now Brown Cow production by Jay Pather.
Constellations is a love story bound up in a thought experiment: what if we could play out some of the many scenarios that “might have been” in our life-defining relationships? This is more nuanced than the Sliding Doors approach. It takes seriously the Many-Worlds Interpretation, the quantum mechanics concept of the multiverse in which all possible outcomes of any given event exist simultaneously.
If that sounds a little heady, it emerges authentically in the play because one of the protagonists, Marianne, is a physicist. She understands the petty contradictions of human life in cosmological terms: relative, that is, to the inconceivably distant stars in an everexpanding universe or the likelihood that time does not proceed in a linear fashion. Her lover and counterpart, Roland, is a beekeeper. He too has a sense of mystery and wonder, but the scale of his world is smaller, more material and comprehensible.
They meet by chance and there are any number of ways in which their relationship could be over before it has begun. In the versions of their story in which they fall in love, they may cheat on one another, separate, reunite, stay apart — or none of these. Still, a sense of fate seems to draw them to each other. Can the attraction between two people be so strong that it is sustained across all the branches of the multiverse?
There is, however, another inexorable force at play: mortality. The two lovers (dare we call them star-crossed?) must navigate the inevitability of death from very different perspectives.
In this production, Mwenya Kabwe as Marianne and Mark Elderkin as Roland join a stellar community of actors who have previously taken on the roles. Payne’s script demands verbal dexterity of the performers as well as an ability to shift in a single beat from the mood of one scenario to another.
While the connection between Marianne and Roland as conveyed by Kabwe and Elderkin is intellectual and emotional more than it is physical, at the core of this wordy and cerebral play lies an unspeakable, somatic experience of pain and loss. Spoiler alert: Marianne develops a brain tumour that starts to affect her speech and will soon become more debilitating.
In the only conversation in Constellations that does not have alternative versions — though it appears in fragments and accumulates meaning through repetition over the course of the play — Marianne tries to explain to Roland her decision to end her life at a euthanasia clinic. Invoking the scientific and philosophical discourses through which she has been able to make sense of her experience, she wavers between affirming and abandoning her own agency.
Do the decisions we make determine which of an infinite number of possible futures we actually end up pursuing? Or is free will merely a comforting illusion? Perhaps, in one of the lives to be, there will be answers to these questions.
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