Constellations

Scientific concept literature isn't new: Tom Stoppard was doing it brilliantly long before numerous apocalyptic examples picketed the runway to the millennium. Nick Payne's new play follows the basic formula: take girl and boy; synthesise with scientific metaphor; insert disturbing thesis; reheat, and serve!

But there's nothing undercooked about Michael Longhurst's excellent, gripping production. And Payne's play, despite having obviously done its quantum physics and beekeeping homework, is funny, tender and startlingly original.

It's some achievement to dramatise the theory of parallel universes in 70 minutes, but Rafe Spall and Sally Hawkins, playing numerous subtly different versions of central characters Roland and Marianne, are the stars here.

'Constellations' feeds a romance story, iteratively, through dozens of possible choices, permutations and lives. It works because of fine acting and because it is also grounded in the ups and downs of dating, sex, love and death: personal and universal moments that everyone can laugh and wince at.

Spall displays a virtuosic talent for comic understatement as Roland, giving us several nice-but-dim variations on his drone-voiced theme, each one funnier than the last. In Longhurst's ingenious in-the-round production, Spall's Roland is a great shock-absorber for Hawkins's febrile, quick-witted Marianne, a cosmologist who chats him up at a mutual friend's barbecue -using the same line in numerous dimensions, to wildly various and comical effect.

The thesis of 'Constellations' is that life is a random aggregation of molecules, love a happy accident and death inevitable. It is an expansively big idea that cools this tense, stylish drama a shade too rapidly. With so many playwrights struggling to graduate from the school of Pinter, it's stimulating to see one standing confidently on the shoulders of Tom Stoppard.

Payne's play, which repeats questions about 'choice' and 'control', falls short of the elegantly sustained 'Arcadia'. But Tom Scutt's design illuminates its themes in a dark space roofed by milky balloons which suggest white cells, stars or flocks of atoms. Move over Brian Cox: this is charismatic theatre which makes quantum physics sexy.