YOU might think that the mind-boggling postulates currently exercising the finest scientific minds concerning the quantum multiverse theory might not be the stuff of red-blooded theatrical engagement.

You’d be wrong, though, because Constellations by Nick Payne is a wholly engaging and thought-provoking dramatic conceit.
It explores the possibility that we may all be inhabiting only one of many universes and poses the question “what if?” in a rom com, originally produced at the Royal Court, which has unusual intellectual rigour.

In it beekeeper Roland (Joe Armstrong) hooks up with cosmologist Marianne (Louise Brealey) at a barbecue and, in a subsequent series of short and often witty scenes, the alternative directions their ensuing relationship might take, from the first flush of passion through separation and a possible reconciliation — the latter underpinned by personal tragedy — is explored from radically different perspectives.