Simon Stephens’s new play is not really about uncertainty. At least, I don’t think it is. Once Heisenberg’s ideas have been floated it is hard to know where to stop applying them. Does the fact of my being a spectator influence what I am watching? This is what generations of actors and directors have said about audiences and plays. Then again, if I become absorbed in the plot, and begin to wonder about what is happening next, will that prevent me concentrating on what I am looking at now? Heisenberg said, I think, that you can’t simultaneously evaluate momentum and position. Mindfulness gurus might recognise the emotional equivalent.
None of which matters as much as it might in this first production by Marianne Elliott and Chris Harper’s new theatre company, Elliott & Harper Productions. There is no need to scowl at Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle simply for being less probing than Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen – which 19 years ago embedded the physicist’s theory in its structure. But there is reason to question how much Stephens’s title is to the point of his play. It looks like an attempt to give intellectual wings to a slight, sometimes sweet romance.
Getting-on-a-bit Kenneth Cranham is, out of the blue, kissed on the neck by free-spirit American Anne-Marie Duff. They start a love affair. Cranham gets the best speeches. One really good riff about the music he likes – heavy metal, opera, new romantic, rap, dubstep – is Stephens’s equivalent of Pinter’s riff on London streets in No Man’s Land. Pinter-like too in its comic surprise is his explanation that what he likes best about being a butcher is “the animals… they have seams”. Cranham makes what seems an effortless best out of this, often looking surprised at what comes out of his mouth. Turned around by love, he makes “no” sound like a question on the way to being “yes”. Duff brings her blazing-eyed sheen to the unenviable part of kooky young woman. They simmer together beguilingly.
Still the Heisenberg heft is in Elliott’s sleight-of-hand production. Bunny Christie’s design, lit by Paule Constable, makes the stage look like a giant ice cube, illuminated by various shades of sherbert. It might, you think, melt. Between scenes everything slides and contracts. Walls are pushed back or glide inwards, a bed topples. Stephens’s observation that music is the space between the notes is brought to visual life.
• At Wyndham’s, London, until 6 January 2018
