14 November 2017

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle at Wyndham's Theatre

One of the Google Alerts that I have is for Simon Stephens so I got an early warning of his latest play, Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, and duly paid £39 for seat A15 in the Grand Circle.

It was ninety minutes straight through which allowed an 8pm start and that gave me plenty of time to go to Govinda's for a curry and Pret for a coffee beforehand.

Surprisingly the theatre was not full and that meant an upgrade from the Grand Circle to the Royal Circle. This has happened to me a few times at theatres and while the upgrade is always nice I would rather that the theatre were full.

The feedback on social media had given me little clue on what to expect so I sat down ready to be surprised.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle is the tale of two people and they are the only two people who appear in it. He was a traditional seventy year old and she was a flighty forty-something. In almost her first sentence she apologised for he foul language which set the scene for some of Stephens' trademark swearing though there was a lot less than in some other plays.

In some ways it was a simple story about the two people told chronologically but it was delicately spiced with some surprises. The play's title comes from the principle that if you observe an elementary particle you cannot know both where it is and where it is going and the woman remarked that she watched her son so closely as he grew up that she always knew where he was at that time but could not see the direction that he was travelling.

That principle applied to us too, as we played close attention to the characters' words and actions it was not possible to see where their story was going.

Their journey through the hour and a half had a mix of emotions and moods. Most of them were happy and light and there was a lot of proper laugh-out-loud humour along the way. This was especially true at the beginning when they clumsily got to know each other.

Both the stars, Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham, were excellent and made me care about them. I wanted them both to have a happy ending and I was interested in everything that happened to them along the way.

The staging was neat with just a few props, things like benches and tables, rising out of the floor while the walls moved and the lighting changed to show us the different places that the story took us to. It appeared simple, though I am sure that it took clever mechanics and electronics to achieve that, and it was very effective.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle was an interesting and unusual tale told in an engaging way. I loved every minute of it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

All comments are welcome. Comments are moderated only to keep out the spammers and all valid comments are published, even those that I disagree with!