"Constellations" Burton Taylor Studio
People will look back on the drizzly summer of 2026 as a vintage season for Oxford drama. ‘It was amazing’, they’ll say. ‘You could throw a dart at the OUDS term card, and whatever it landed on would be brilliant.’ I’m not sure what’s caused this tsunami of theatrical effervescence. The weather? The end-of-days panic of the Iran crisis? The psychological impact of the Schwarzman Centre giving humanities students from different disciplines a creative home they can share with each other? Or maybe, every so often, the stars align, and a cohort of great shows just happens to coincide. And talking of stars aligning, the latest stonking hit to grace the Burton Taylor is Nick Payne’s 2012 two-person, non-linear mind-bender, Constellations . It's an Escher woodcut of a play, in which two sometime lovers, Roland and Marianne, explore endlessly evolving, splitting and dividing presents, futures and pasts of their relationship. Roland is a beekeeper who yearns for a life as unvarying and pred...