A Disappearing Number
A Disappearing Number, By Complicite
5 September 2007 - 6 October 2007
Barbican Theatre
Conceived and directed by Simon McBurney
Devised by the Company
Original music by Nitin Sawhney
Design by Michael Levine
Co-produced by Complicite, barbicanbite07, Wiener Festwochen, Holland Festival, Ruhrfestspiele, in association with Theatre Royal Plymouth
On April 14th 1913 Srinivasa Ramanujan arrived in Cambridge after a long journey from India. A former postal clerk, he spent the next five years working closely with the mathematics professor G.H. Hardy, who had invited Ramanujan on the strength of some theorems he sent through the post. Thus began what Complicite call, “the most mysterious and romantic mathematical collaboration of all time.”
Or did this collaboration begin with the first letter Hardy received? Or when Ramanujan, a Brahmin, sought permission to go overseas? Did it begin when he first began asking questions? When Hardy was playing Real Tennis? Or when the S.S. Nevada left port in Madras? Where or whenever it began, ‘A Disappearing Number’ draws inspiration from Ramanujan’s time in Cambridge like water from a well, exploring its implications for mathematics, creativity, spirituality and – most of all – the continuity of time, space and emotions. In doing so, it travels between Europe and India, the First World War and the present day, the burden of proof and the possibilities of string theory. It weaves between themes and stories, and eventually weaves them all together. By the time this mesmeric performance draws to a close, it’s impossible to say whether anything has a beginning or an end.
And yet ‘A Disappearing Number’ starts with quite a different approach. The play opens with a mathemetician explaining some concepts, as if the theatre is a lecture hall and we are her students. Then an actor comes along and dramatically disolves the fourth wall – he pushes the set around, adjusts his colleague’s microphone, tells us that he’s an actor and that none of this is real – apart from the maths, that is. As a theatrical device, this is even more clever than it might seem at first. It dynamically engages the audience and introduces us to the malleability of the set. By drawing us in as collaborators in this fiction (instead of spectators), it harnesses our imaginations to create and populate complex scene changes. But just as the actor acknowledges the artifice of the theatrical endeavour (and builds our trust), he tells us that the ‘Maths is real.’ He reveals one trick, in other words, to pull off a bigger one. In one sleight of hand, we are both initiated into the fabric of the play and convinced of the strength of its message.
This initiation is important because ‘A Disappearing Number’ does not have a clear direction. It meanders between times, concepts and stories, presenting fragments of visual and aural experience whose significance is not immediately clear. At times, it can be frustrating when the drama pauses on a piece of action that’s hard to understand. At others, it’s disconcerting to find a thread disappear just when its meaning starts to come into focus. Instead of building like a linear series – like the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 that were drawn on a board at the beginning of the show – ‘A Disappearing Number’ fills out like the circles of chalk that are poured on stage, or like the inter-continuity of numbers that comes to light as the play progresses. Just as there is no gap between numbers, so there are no gaps in or between the stories told. The device of the opening scene gives this anti-linear continuity the time to develop – it wins our trust and buys our patience to wait for patterns to emerge.
When these patterns do emerge, it is almost imperceptibly. They evolve through words, sounds, images and movements that are layered together in a continuous stream. So although we see Ramanujan die at the beginning of the play as well as at the end, this circularity becomes clear somewhere in the middle. Nevertheless, the play’s themes don’t aspire to be universal. The tragic love story between an enthusiastic lecturer and her ambitious husband is not a cliché, but a moving and sombre relationship between two people who appear very real. And what could be a hackneyed distinction between a ‘spiritual’ East and a ‘rational’ West is given credibility by its weight in real relationships. When the overall ‘pattern’ of the piece makes itself clear it is not as a solution, but a reconciliation of individual truths.
Complicite is one of Europe’s best known theatre companies. Its name is synonymous with experimental theatre and it has been influential in terms of movement and visual display, as much as anything else. So there is a tendency to arrive at A Disappearing Number and expect to be blown away. But don’t expect results without giving something in return. This play requires effort and engagement, and (for some at least), an initial leap of faith that – yes – mathematics can be a beautiful and delicate skeleton for art.
Drawing from Ramanujan and Hardy’s collaboration like a well, A Disappearing Number never quite gets to the bottom of how their relationship worked. Likewise, India is a country skirted around – visited or left behind, but never explained or lived in. And the relationship between two lovers is only revealed through their desire for closeness, not the closeness itself. In fact, A Disappearing Number does just that on its audience – it disappears. What is left instead of plot resolution, is the loud, enduring resonance of memory, creativity and belief.
Written by Mary Paterson
