Wyndhams, London
Kenneth Lonergan’s tale of astronomy and midlife misery makes fine use of an A-list cast but never truly explodes into life
With Matthew Broderick and Elizabeth McGovern heading the cast, this feels more like The Starry Vehicle. But, although Kenneth Lonergan has written superb screenplays such as Manchester By the Sea, and his 10-year-old play is wryly observant, it is too discursive to make great drama. Mark, its 52-year-old hero, who lectures at New York’s Hayden Planetarium but feels he has missed his vocation as an astronomer, occasionally reminded me of Uncle Vanya without the rich sense of life that accompanies the Chekhovian consciousness of failure.
Lonergan interweaves a number of stories. The main one concerns Mark’s thwarted dreams and awareness of the gulf between his dull domestic existence and professional preoccupation with the cosmos. But we also follow the fate of his lover, a Puerto Rican single mum who acts as weekend nurse to a testy cancer patient. Lonergan touches on a wide variety of themes: the midlife crisis, the difficulties of parent-child relationships, the mysteries of the universe. There are witty episodes, the best of which shows Mark being censoriously graded by one of his Planetarium students.
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