Robert Tanitch reviews Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle at Wyndham’s Theatre, London WC2
Don’t be put off by the title. The play was a big hit on Broadway and is not as heavy-going as you might fear.
Werner Karl Heisenberg (1901-1976) was a German theoretical physicist and one of the key pioneers of quantum mechanics.
Ann-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham in Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle
Simon Stephens’s 90-minute two-hander, however, is not about Heisenberg; it uses his Uncertainty Principle, published in 1927, as a springboard.
Nature is not predictable and nothing is inevitable until it happens. Intentions can never be precisely established.
If you watch something closely enough you have no possible way of telling where it’s going or how fast it’s getting there
There is no need to do any scientific research in advance. You can read the programme when you get home.
The two actors are Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham. The director is Marianne Elliott with whom Stephens worked On The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.
The stage is bare but for two pop-up chairs, a table and a bed. The walls move and the colours change between scenes which give the space different dimensions.
Two strangers, an American woman and a British man, have an encounter in a London railway station.
The woman is 42, exhausting but captivating. She says she is a waitress but she is in fact a receptionist at a primary school. She has a 19-year-old son who has walked out on her and she wants to be reunited with him. But she hasn’t the money for the flight to America.
The man is 75. He looks like a shy brooding intellectual. He is in fact a butcher, self-effacing, reserved. He has done nothing with his life. He’s been nowhere and he hasn’t had sex for a very long time. His business is losing money.
What does she see in the old man? What does he see in her? Can you predict whether they will reject each other or stay together?
The chemistry between the actors is more convincing than the chemistry between the people they are playing.
To learn more about Robert Tanitch and his reviews, click here to go to his website
