A DISAPPEARING NUMBER
Barbican
Theatre, London EC2
Opened 11 September, 2007
****
The arts and the sciences in our culture often seem to engage in a
reciprocal snobbery, even contempt: each side imagines itself unjustly
slighted by the other, and so treats its opposite poorly in supposed
return. It is thus especially admirable for Simon McBurney and
Complicité to make theatre out of the wonders of pure
mathematics.
The play adopts twin strands of narrative. In one, we follow (often
retrospectively) the romance between a man and his mathematician
beloved; in the other, we attempt to grasp the passionate intellectual
relationship between the intuitive, brilliant Srinivasa Ramanujan and
Cambridge don G.H. Hardy during the second decade of the last century.
It is not easy to connect emotionally with conversations which take
place almost entirely in number theory, but periodically one is struck
by the simple beauty of a proposition which, although expressed solely
in terms of ideas (which is what numbers are), can nevertheless be more
real and invariant than the physical world. It is at once simple,
massive and yet somehow transcendent, like sunrise at Stonehenge.
This simplicity, even in the face of what may seem wildly abstruse
mathematical theorems (Ramanujan first attracted Hardy's attention by
proving that the sum of 1+2+3+...to infinity equals minus one-twelfth),
serves Complicité well. The company's last Barbican appearance,
with the Haruki Murakami adaptation The
Elephant Vanishes, was visually ravishing, but struck me as
probably too eager to indulge in hi-tech wizardry as a kind of
modern-day exotica, an easy emblem for contemporary Japan. This staging
is much more elegant: rotating black- and whiteboards facilitate
entrances and exits, the projection techniques used are seldom
ostentatious, and the real stars of the show are the numerical
concepts. (The performers' roles are not even individually identified
in the programme.) Indeed, some of the most obtrusive moments are those
in which dramatic action is accompanied by Indian dance – another form
of shorthand exotica. Conversely, Hiren Chate's live tabla playing
sometimes morphs seductively into pure mathematics, especially when the
recited vocal padhant
accompaniment of its rhythms shades into chants of number sequences
reminiscent of the libretto to Philip Glass's Einstein On The Beach. (Glass,
coincidentally, had worked as a student on ways of representing Indian
musics in western notation.) One can hear the beauty of the sequences
without grasping the rules which govern them.
The evening (110 minutes without interval) takes a while to get going.
Saskia Reeves' opening maths lecture reveals a palpable gap between a
subject which relies on precision in its terminology and the
too-frequently imprecise delivery of the lines: such moments would
scarcely count as fluffs in another theatrical context, but here they
are disproportionately conspicuous. Then, just as we are beginning to
shuffle awkwardly, Paul Bhattacharjee enters and addresses us directly:
"You're probably wondering if this is the whole show..." As pre-emptive
strikes of self-deprecation go, it is impeccably judged.
And of course, the "real" subject is nothing as simple as the stories
of Ramanujan and Hardy, of Al and Ruth... not even as simple as the
basic yet eloquent language of number. It expands to take in all kinds
of concepts which have similar yet elusive meanings in maths and in
other areas, such as "proof", "identity" and so on. At one point, a pun
is perpetrated that is so grim it would be in poor taste if it were not
expressed so obliquely: the total number of casualties in World War One
is expressed as the product of a series of prime numbers – a
mathematical process, we are told, known as "decomposition". Yet even
this chimes with the fatalism exhibited by Ramanujan and the repeated
depiction of transience in characters' lives. For number sequences,
like life, keep progressing.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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