The Stage

A Disappearing Number

Published Thursday 13 September 2007 at 17:20 by Jason Best

Simon McBurney and Complicite’s new show celebrates the mystery and beauty of the higher reaches of mathematics in a way that is at once dazzlingly cerebral and exhilaratingly playful, but also surprisingly moving.

It begins with a bluestocking academic delivering a maths lecture of comically forbidding complexity, only for a fellow actor to interrupt her by brazenly pointing out the illusory nature of what we are watching.

She is an actor, not a lecturer. Everything on stage is fake, except the mathematics. All the equations are real.

Yet what follows actually demonstrates the affinities of maths and art, as McBurney and his nine-strong cast interweave two parallel narratives of cross-cultural partnerships cut short by death. In one, set around the time of the First World War, untutored Indian mathematics prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan collaborates with Cambridge don GH Hardy. In the other, set in the present day, an Asian-American financial analyst woos, weds and loses an English university lecturer.

The two stories illustrate some profound truths. Just as mathematicians seek beauty in the patterns made by numbers, so does Complicite create by means of its stagecraft inspired connections, correspondences and, yes, moments of beauty. And just as instinct, intuition and imagination lie at the heart of theatre, so do they underpin the work of great mathematicians.

Not that the audience is left out. When we see a Madras taxi in some plastic chairs or the white duvet on a hotel bed become the polar ice cap, we too are making impressive leaps of the imagination.