Jenny Galloway and Faline England in Heisenberg at the Arcola Theatre. Credit Charlie FlintKatharine Farmer directs Simon Stephen’s two hander which I last saw at Wyndham’s Theatre in the West End in October 2017 with Kenneth Cranham and Anne Marie Duff. In the original, the play was more fully titled Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle. This iteration involves a slight reworking of the characters, with Georgie (Faline England) developing a fixation for an older woman Alex (Jenny Galloway) a seventy-five year old bored butcher, who hasn’t done much living, but may be about to start. The scientific elements which were a tad clunky in the 2017 outing, appear to have been considerably toned-down, which helps simplify matters but also acts to eliminate the more nuanced existential conundrums associated with interpersonal relations.
Despite the undoubted talents of the playwright (and indeed director Marianne Elliott), the West End run hardly set the world on fire eight years ago. Here, through the valiant efforts of both performers, there is an attempt to imbue a fresh take to the gender norms, although there is also a distinct lack of genuine chemistry between the women despite their actorly efforts to suggest otherwise. Matters may also have been hampered rather than assisted in this regard, by Ms England’s casting, for despite stronger familiarity with the script, she has only recently finished performing in a stateside version with a male Alex which may more naturally have informed her physicality in the piece.
Ultimately, as the two women meet for protracted conversations during which the older is often surprised and blindsided by sometimes outrageous comments and a tendency to verbal diarrhoea, they develop familiarity, of a sort, but it never truly manifests as intimacy despite some weirdly uncomfortable attempts to suggest this aspect of interaction.
The stoic patience and barely raised eyebrows from Ms Galloway are often cause for amusement as she humours the gushing puppy before her. But in the main, the play in this form seems to do little to illuminate the mental and emotional connectivity between two women of disparate generations. The denouement set in the US serves as a slightly ambiguous (if not usurious) denouncement to a play, which lightly tiptoes around its subject matter whilst never fully revealing anything substantial about love developing between women of differing backgrounds and eras.
