Intellect And Intuition Count Equally

Sydney Morning Herald

Friday November 21, 2008

Reviewed by Mark Hopkins

A DISAPPEARING NUMBER

Complicite

Sydney Theatre,

Until December 2

THE London-based Complicite's A Disappearing Number is a production of striking imagery, fluent storytelling, intellectual ambition and emotional intelligence. It explores relationships, abstract and corporeal, as expressed by mathematics and as experienced by people. Without condescension, it makes accessible on an intuitive level the significance and wonder of pure mathematical reasoning, finding in theatrical expression the beauty and aesthetic precision of numbers.

The central character is Srinivasa Ramanujan (Shane Shambhu), an early 20th-century mathematician whose intuition and imaginative insight far exceed his procedural thoroughness. Able to conceive and express (but not necessarily prove) never before perceived relationships between numbers, he represents the mathematician as a perfectly authentic artist. His mathematics, embedded and reinforced in the theatrical design, creates a sensory affinity between number and performance, in visual and aural patterns in music, dance, staging and multimedia projections.

The central relationship is between a mathematics lecturer, Ruth Minnen (Saskia Reeves), and a hedge fund and futures trader, Al Cooper (Firdous Bamji). Without a hint of didacticism these professional derivatives of mathematics chart a very human journey towards a deeper understanding of cultural differentiation and the mystery of life, love and loss.

A Disappearing Number is a cerebral experience but a whole mind rather than "left-brain" bias permeates its form. It invites consideration of other ways of knowing (emotional and spiritual) without appeal to sentiment or faith. It achieves in modern theatre what scholars have written of art in classical Greece: a remarkable degree of intellectual quality, with logic and certainty in its construction but with intelligently controlled energy and passion.

Those interested in the convergence of physics and Eastern philosophy will appreciate the compression of so much contemporary thinking in the symbolic return of Cooper to India guided by a physicist (Paul Bhattacharjee). Those with knowledge of quantum mechanics and theories of discontinuity will accept the focus on abstract mathematical continuity imagined between discrete integers, appreciate the theoretical conflation of time and space and recognise the symbolic significance of no interval in two hours of drama.

Those whose first love is theatre will distinguish in this collaboratively devised piece an extraordinary unity of style, accomplished performances and inspiring design. Complicite has created an exact, subtle and clear production using the language of theatre to bring elegant perspicuity to the purpose and value (if not the detail) of pure mathematics, dissociating mathematics from soulless calculation and reconnecting it with imagination, beauty and humanity.

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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