A Disappearing Number (sept 9th) | Saturday, September 22, 2007 |
I'm not much of a theatre goer , but Complicite are one production company who over the last few years have dropped into the "don't care what, go see it" category.
I was able to see their new production "A Disappearing Number" the day after it opened in London at the Barbican. The picture below doesn't really do it justice as Complcite's works are built upon the use of light to create stage sets and usually extravagent sound.
From the Guardian
My version is somewhat shorter, an excellent production and a lovely evening out (only spoilt somewhat by having to pack when I got home).
I was able to see their new production "A Disappearing Number" the day after it opened in London at the Barbican. The picture below doesn't really do it justice as Complcite's works are built upon the use of light to create stage sets and usually extravagent sound.
From the Guardian
Maths, mysticism and mortality combine in Complicite's latest mind-expanding show conceived and directed by Simon McBurney. But, as with the earlier Mnemonic, the company display a rare capacity to take abstract concepts and invest them with strong emotion and embody them with virtuosic theatricality.
Two stories are artfully interwoven in this 120-minute show. One concerns the intellectual kinship between a Brahmin mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a Cambridge colleague, GH Hardy, around the time of the first world war . This factual story is balanced, in a distinctly Stoppardian way, by the relationship between a modern university lecturer, Ruth, and her American-Asian partner, Al, who is a futures dealer.
While the Brahmin pioneer dies prematurely of TB in alien England, so Ruth, who has impulsively travelled to Chennai to study his work, expires through a brain aneurism. But this is typical of a work filled with parallels and convergences reminding us that everything is connected to everything else. We are constantly reminded of Hardy's dictum that "a mathematician, like a poet or painter, is a maker of patterns". And, if any idea runs through the show, it is that maths offers a metaphor for the universe as well as a rational explanation of it: even the notion of infinite series, explained with hilarious elaboration by Ruth in the opening section, implies the idea of dateless eternity.
Far from being cold calculation, maths is seen as a source of beauty and passion but also of dangerously consuming personal obsession. All these ideas are realised with Complicite's customary elan by the nine-strong company and Michael Levine's design. A spinning screen whisks us from Chennai to Cambridge. A white-sheeted bed turns into an evocation of Greenland glimpsed from an airplane window. A Brahmin body-string ushers us into the realm of mathematical theorems. And Nithin Sawney's music at one point uses insistent rhythmic beats to echo numerical progressions.
Even maths duffers will respond warmly to a show that confirms theatre's ability to make the sciences manifest.
Two stories are artfully interwoven in this 120-minute show. One concerns the intellectual kinship between a Brahmin mathematical genius, Srinivasa Ramanujan, and a Cambridge colleague, GH Hardy, around the time of the first world war . This factual story is balanced, in a distinctly Stoppardian way, by the relationship between a modern university lecturer, Ruth, and her American-Asian partner, Al, who is a futures dealer.
While the Brahmin pioneer dies prematurely of TB in alien England, so Ruth, who has impulsively travelled to Chennai to study his work, expires through a brain aneurism. But this is typical of a work filled with parallels and convergences reminding us that everything is connected to everything else. We are constantly reminded of Hardy's dictum that "a mathematician, like a poet or painter, is a maker of patterns". And, if any idea runs through the show, it is that maths offers a metaphor for the universe as well as a rational explanation of it: even the notion of infinite series, explained with hilarious elaboration by Ruth in the opening section, implies the idea of dateless eternity.
Far from being cold calculation, maths is seen as a source of beauty and passion but also of dangerously consuming personal obsession. All these ideas are realised with Complicite's customary elan by the nine-strong company and Michael Levine's design. A spinning screen whisks us from Chennai to Cambridge. A white-sheeted bed turns into an evocation of Greenland glimpsed from an airplane window. A Brahmin body-string ushers us into the realm of mathematical theorems. And Nithin Sawney's music at one point uses insistent rhythmic beats to echo numerical progressions.
Even maths duffers will respond warmly to a show that confirms theatre's ability to make the sciences manifest.
My version is somewhat shorter, an excellent production and a lovely evening out (only spoilt somewhat by having to pack when I got home).
Labels: London Theatre Barbican
