"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 predestined as that of a worker or drone. Marianne is a theoretical physicist, whose work, postulating on the implications of the infinite possible universes theory (don't make me explain it) takes over the structure of the play itself.

But Constellations is a galaxy away from Spider-Man Across The Multiverse. Instead, this is a moving and profound meditation on the limits and possibilities of human potential: the lives we could have had and the loves we might have lost with a change of one word here, one gesture there. It's Sliding Doors turned up to eleven.

As the play unfolds, like a complex origami model, it expands, both on the stage and in your mind. It's lyrical, with virtuoso speeches about particles and infinity; it's comical, with near-identical scenes differentiated only by a differently described hairstyle; and it's tragic, with Marianne facing terminal cancer, and the fractal possibilities acquiring an almost human desperation of their own as she considers the myriad, gloomy options that lie ahead.

All this is in Nick Payne's script. What co-directors Sachi Shah and Lauren Lendrevie have brought to it is an innovation so bold that it has no right to work at all. But it doesn't just work: it supercharges the original text and gives it universal relevance, by casting the play with not just one but three couples.

This decision adds a whole extra dimension of splintering alternatives to the narrative. Instead of one couple exploring life's many avenues, we now have three. Are they the same personalities, shared between multiple actors? Are they three discrete pairs? Do they follow different paths, or do they merge into one? It's impossible to say.

One thing is clear though: having three different actors play the same role makes it feel almost as though they are different people. Leya Carter’s Marianne is softly-spoken, anxious and depressive, while Alfred Hennell Cole’s Roland balances her with gentleness and warmth; Niamh Hoyland’s Marianne is more direct and open, with Alex Silverwood-Cope finding a broader, more comical route into Roland; and Juliet Taub’s paranoid, talkative Marianne is met by Kit Parsons’ more muted, considered Roland. The different approaches are so marked, the characters so apparently distinct from each other (despite bearing the same names) that it’s actually hard to believe Payne’s script wasn’t written to be performed this way. (In fact the script frequently returns to the idea of thirds, which, who knows, may have been the starting point for this radical interpretation.)

In order to build these distinct characterisations, Shah and Lendrevie analysed the play like a game of chess, dissected it like surgeons, and rebuilt it with multiple bodies, like Dr Frankenstein. And in the words of Frankenstein, ‘It’s alive!’ What Shah and Lendrevie have teased out of the source material adds even more facets and fractal possibilities to the original script, and makes Payne’s play feel as though it’s not about just one random couple, but about everyone.

You might think that such a radical concept would swamp the play with bodies and confusion. But the staging is so artful, neatly dividing the space into three areas (sofa, hatstand, table), and the lighting so sensible, illuminating only the area currently in use, and blinking off and on to signal each new scene, that the whole thing feels completely natural.

On top of all these wonders, there's one that outdoes them all. Due to the indisposition of a previous actor, Juliet Taub only took on the role of Marianne four days before this production opened. It has a word-heavy script, full of half-repetitions and complex interplay. And yet Taub is not only word perfect, she also delivers a performance every bit as nuanced and accomplished as the rest of the cast. That's not just impressive, it borders on the impossible. In an alternative universe she might still be at home writing her latest essay. I'm happy with our version of reality.