To include the full title above would have left little space for a review. Properly, it is entitled Tenet: A True Story About The Revolutionary Politics Of Telling The Truth About Truth As Edited By Someone Who Is Not Julian Assange In Any Literal Sense. As with their collaboration last year, Tonight Sandy Grierson Will Lecture, Dance And Box, creators Grierson and Lorne Campbell (who also directs) are concerned not so much with the titular figure. Grierson told the story of early-20th-century huckster and man of mystery Arthur Cravan; here, performers Lucy Ellinson and Jon Foster focus on Évariste Galois, a 19th-century revolutionary French republican and mathematician who died at the age of 20 in 1832, in an unexplained duel. Galois, as portrayed here, was a mercurial figure who had made a number of intuitive leaps in algebraic theory but was unable comprehensibly to explain his discoveries. Foster enacts him making impassioned but hazy declarations about what we know we know and, as if it were a great cosmic law, that sometimes a particular approach to solving polynomial equations works and sometimes it doesn’t.
    
In contrast to the fraught subject matter, the performance style is free and easy. Ellinson serves us tea and biscuits as we enter (leading to a later pun that in 1832 there was a Bourbon on the French throne), and the pair enlist us to aid the storytelling by symbolising various parents, teachers, judges and juries. No performance is necessary on our part, we just sit in our places and suppose (although, on press night, Ellinson hesitated for a delicious moment before appointing Vanessa Redgrave as a juror).
    
Galois’ methodology involved finding roots, or “radicals”. A recurring phrase, clearly symbolic, is “the radical simplifies”. In the final phase, the focus shifts to Assange, examining his Galoisien view that questions and answers are simply different angles on the same process. This, alas, is where it becomes apparent that the play is in effect an emblem of itself: it is unable to make clear or convey the excitement of what it knows it knows, leaving us in a frustrated fog. Christopher Haydon’s quietly revolutionary agenda at the artistic helm of the Gate is exciting, but on this occasion his programming falls into the “noble attempt” category. Mind you, it’s not often you see a stage show performed on what looks exactly like a White Stripes album cover.

Written for the Financial Times.