Evening Standard Theatre Awards: why our judges chose the winners

Theatre & Dance - Arts - London Evening Standard: Have 65 minutes ever passed with such scintillating, emotionally sweeping force? Not in some while, which helps account for the singular power of Nick Payne’s prismatic two-hander, which can now be seen at the Duke of York’s following a Royal Court Theatre Upstairs premiere last January that stayed fresh in our minds throughout the year. A puzzle play that director Michael Longhurst’s expert production keeps utterly lucid throughout, the narrative refracts the often anxious arc of a relationship through discussions of quantum physics, beekeeping and matters of love and loss, all the while playing with theatrical form itself. The result might sound overly cute or tricksy but Payne’s writing is neither of those things, instead achieving a buoyancy signalled in visual terms by the balloons clustered around Tom Scutt’s set. The play finds its ideal interpreters in Rafe Spall and the supremely open-faced Sally Hawkins, but then pretty much everything about Constellations feels heaven-sent.