Heisenberg

An unusual – and unlikely - love story begins outside London’s St Pancras Station when Georgie Burns (Kat Stewart), an unhappy, over-sharing forty-two-year-old American, picks up Alex Priest (Peter Kowitz), a taciturn, reclusive seventy-five-year-old London butcher.  Her first move - so we’re told because we don’t see it – is to kiss him on the neck.  (It’s a good thing we don’t see it because not seeing it makes it easier to believe.)  That’s the ‘meet-cute’ of the traditional rom-com and Heisenberg does indeed move through the steps of that genre.  Alex is bemused but wary; Georgie is pushy, tactless and relentless.  He is intrigued; she flatters him.  And a curious, complex but perhaps not quite believable relationship develops.  There are revelations: she’s not a waitress; he never married.  She has been abandoned and is alone; he loves music and can dance the tango. 

The title refers to Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, which states that both the position and the velocity of a particle cannot be measured at exactly the same time.  If that metaphor for Georgie and Alex seems a little forced - or cute – it is the metaphor of the play, which tells us to accept the unexpected and to open ourselves to that which cannot be measured - to take a risk, take a chance and become more alive.  What happens in the course of the story is an ‘exchange of gifts’ between the characters.  Does Georgie engineer what happens?  Or is it sheer chance and opportunity?  It’s ambiguous – and our responses are kept nicely ambivalent.

Director Tom Healey elicits subtle and detailed performances and opts for minimal sets (design by Anna Borghesi) and also with Bronwyn Pringle’s lighting changes.  Successive locations are indicated by text projected above the stage.  This works well enough, even if it involves the cast trundling furniture and props around in blackouts between scenes.  Clemence Williams’ sound could come up a notch and I don’t see why it doesn’t.

Heisenberg is a chamber piece play that is warm, sweet, insightful, sometimes funny, sometimes touching, with successive reveals skilfully placed and paced.  But in the end, it’s rather slight and, really, it would – or could – work just as well, in fact better, as a television play in which the locations (such as Alex’s bachelor house, or by a river in New Jersey) might play a part – and no blackouts.  It’s a piece very much sustained by the cast: if Ms Stewart were less adorable, less blessed with comic timing and fast mood changes, and less vivacious, she might not get away with her volatile, manipulative Georgie.  If Peter Kowitz lacked his extraordinary ability to transform himself utterly, to give such a layered, detailed portrait of his Alex – so that his reveals are genuinely surprising and delightful - then this piece just would not sustain. 

Simon Stephens has an intimidating list of credits, including The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, but given his achievements and awards, he might well have written Heisenberg over a weekend.  It’s undoubtedly well-intentioned but it’s undemanding and, in its straight naturalism, rather old fashioned in today’s theatre.

Michael Brindley

Photographer: Pia Johnson