Our maths teacher at school was a small, dapper man nicknamed Ned who always wore a waistcoat no matter what the weather was doing. He had a beard so neat that you could have turned his perfectly oval head upside down and he would have still looked the same. Five years of slogging away at quadratic equations under Ned’s watchful eye left me confirmed in the belief that maths was anything but beautiful: a prejudice as comfortable as a favourite pair of slippers and one I enjoyed for the next 20 years until I went to Complicite’s A Disappearing Number; back at the Barbican Theatre after its triumph in 2007.
A Disappearing Number is a multimedia, multi-layered, multi-award winning play about Srinivasa Ramanujan, a largely self-taught mathematical genius from South India who came to England to work with the celebrated Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy in 1913. Complicite co-founder Simon McBurney has interwoven Ramanujan’s extraordinary life and work with a fictional contemporary story of love and loss about a British maths professor, Ruth Minnen, and an American businessman, Al Cooper.
The action moves through time and space like the strands of a beautiful, ethereal dream. The visual effects and lighting are of the high standard for which Complicite is so famous, blending perfectly with Nitin Sawhney’s original music and the live tabla playing of Hiren Chate on stage.
Much of the complex theory expressed in the play was beyond me and, I suspect, most of the rest of the audience but that did not stop it from being fascinating. Dr. Johnson opined that you do not need to be a carpenter to know a good table and, thanks to McBurney and a strong Complicite ensemble cast, you do not need to be a mathematician to appreciate the extraordinary power of Ramanujan’s incredible ideas. These ideas made possible the digital wizardry used with such stunning skill in this production.
Like Ramanujan’s life, the stories in the play contain pain and pathos. A Disappearing Number is as much about miscommunication, cultural snobbery and alienation as it is about groundbreaking discoveries. Numbers assume the soothing character of unchanging constants in worlds fractured by war and death.
At the end of his career Professor Hardy rated the chance to collaborate with Ramanujan as his greatest achievement and, in his book A Mathematician’s Apology (one of the play’s source texts), he said:
“Mathematicians are only makers of patterns, like poets or painters.”
Maybe that is what Ned was trying to tell us at school. I wish I’d been paying more attention.
A Disappearing Number | Complicite | Barbican Theatre, London, until 1 November.
