Every now and then the Royal Court does this. It throws up a small-cast, depth-charge production that makes bigger dramas look over-stuffed and under-nourished. It did so metaphysically with Caryl Churchill's A Number and emotionally with Mike Bartlett's Cock. It has done so again with Nick Payne's wiry new play.
Constellations is a love story that investigates ideas about time. Or it's a look at theories about time that takes the form of a love story. It tells us that we may have no such thing as free will, but leaves its audience to make up its own mind. Following the lead given 14 years ago by Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, in which a scientific theory is demonstrated in the structure of the play that discusses it, Constellations embodies its doubts and questions. It quizzes the notion of destiny by giving alternative versions of every scene: each episode is re-enacted with variations and a different conclusion.
The risk of desiccation, of programmatic experimentalism is knocked on the head by force of feeling and a first-rate production. Payne's dialogue is idiomatic, often comic, and Michael Longhurst's direction is nippy and precise. Running at just over an hour, the action is set by designer Tom Scutt on a square stage surrounded by the audience. As they circle around each other (time is symmetrical, the play counterintuitively instructs us) the two characters – one a physicist, one a bee-keeper – often look like combatants in a boxing ring. This is an unusual ring, though: its floor is covered in hexagons, as if the actors were dancing over a honeycomb.
The really transporting aspect of the evening is that Constellations is performed by real stars. Sally Hawkins, more familiar from Mike Leigh's movies and from television's Tipping the Velvet, is rarely seen on stage. She makes you wonder why. Delicate and fiery, she moves round the stage like a light-footed schoolgirl, but drops a wisecrack like a miniature Mae West. She, the physicist of the couple (hurrah for non-predictable casting), is both precise and emotionally high-voltage. Rafe Spall – the bee-keeper – is her perfect opposite. Relaxed and loose-limbed, he goes from slow-moving amiability to occasional doltishness, gradually inflecting his expression of mild bewilderment.
Approaching Constellations along the corridor leading to the auditorium, you might think you were in for a celebration: white balloons dangle from the ceiling. You'd be wrong. Balloons also crowd the ceiling of the theatre, and it's a tribute to the production that these come to suggest different things: at first, a galactic jostle and later a cluster of cells. At the end of the evening they carry a significance similar to that of a ghost white bicycle left at the scene of an accident.
Travelling Light is a play about the movies that makes you want to leave the stalls and go to the cinema. Nicholas Wright's new work sets out to celebrate the power of the silent image but barracks those images with words. It aims to show the thrill of the silent moving picture but its own storytelling method is unfluid. It seeks to animate the life of the shtetl but wheels on a series of pop-up Jewish characters. In Nicholas Hytner's heavy-handed production it suffers in comparison with the larky ease that The Artist brought to the subject of the non-talkies.
This is a rare disappointment from the pen of Wright, who has previously brought such verve and particularity to the Duchess of Windsor, Vincent van Gogh and Melanie Klein. It charts the rise of cinematography with the help of a stroll-on elderly narrator, a celebrated Hollywood director who looks back on his early attempts to document the life of his relatives in eastern Europe. The knowledge of his later success drains away surprise from what is about to appear on stage; his introductions are strangely simple, as if he were chalking up captions to the action in a silent movie. His past is crammed with lightbulb moments – the first edit, the first cinema, the first continuity near-disaster – that are quaint but not quite funny enough.
Lauren O'Neil is beguiling and unaffected as the local muse who becomes the shtetl's first star. Antony Sher barnstorms it as a timber merchant-turned-backer. Sher is at his most interesting as an actor when making self-consciousness part of his armoury: he excels at acting the part of a performer, or a self-advertising deceiver, such as Richard III or Iago. Here, required to transmit uninflected passion, he simply roars, in an English not merely broken but smashed to pieces. The most persuasive parts of the evening aren't on stage at all. They are up on the back walls: grey and white photographs of the high-walled wide wooden buildings of the shtetl.
At the lively Theatre503 Lucy Skilbeck has directed a smart – black reflecting floor, percussive bursts between scenes – production of what is billed as the first "wikiplay". In Man in the Middle, Ron Elisha, Australian playwright and doctor, supplies these facts about Julian Assange: that his hair suddenly went white; that he wears three pairs of jeans, one on top of the other, which makes him smell unsavoury; that he'll scrawl women's telephone numbers all the way up his arms; that he'll manage to get his lawyer to give him his tie to wear in court and ask him, "How can I help your career?"; that when a date, waking up to finding his penis lodged in her, asks if he is wearing something, he's liable to say: "Yes, you."
The production slips in and out of mimicry. On the one hand there's Kathy ("at least the whisky was stiff") Lette, cartoonish but recognisable, with pixie red hair and matching shoes; on the other there's Assange's one-time ghost writer, Andrew O'Hagan, not famous for being ganglingly tall and black, played by the actor who also plays Obama (there is terrific doubling throughout). There are no conclusions about motives or reliability: this is a vivid case study not an arraignment. There is, though, some capture of Assange's wild rhetoric and of the liquidity of his character: the skill of an adult, the urges of an adolescent, the temperament of a toddler.
