In Conversation: Nick Payne, Arts Theatre

Only just in his thirties, Nick Payne is already a wildly accomplished playwright. In 2009, his leftfield comedy If There Is I Haven’t Found it Yet won the George Devine Award, and promised the arrival of a serious new talent. Its successor Constellations made good that promise, coaxing wonder from rather unusual source material.

The theory of the multiverse states that the universe we know is only one of many, and that in these other universes all possibilities are realised. Payne’s stroke of inspiration was to apply this idea to a relationship, and in so doing to create a romance out of ‘what ifs?’ Academically-informed and richly humane, it rightly transferred to Broadway where it starred Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Wilson.

Payne’s current project is to stray once more into the scientific territory. He is currently writing a play based on the life of Paul Dirac, the Nobel prize-winning Mathematician, and an early father of quantum mechanics. Evidently this is a playwright at the height of his powers, with the confidence to bring some of our age’s most challenging ideas to the stage.

On the 22^nd November, the wunderkind playwright comes to the Arts Theatre where he’ll be in conversation with the ASF Artistic Director Laura Attridge. We can’t wait to hear what he has in store for us.