With Simon McBurney’s A Disappearing Number, Complicite Theatre presents an entirely new concept of love, death and
infinity before its audience with mathematicians as artists and mathematics as life.
Centuries after Srinivasa Ramanujan came up with his bewildering mathematical theories and GM Hardy wrote his compelling essay, A Mathematician’s Apology, Simon intends to bring alive the story of “this young South Indian boy whose mind was so open to everything that he travelled across half the world to meet a British homosexual man locked up in Cambridge rooms.”
“We are talking about romantic influences,” he says about the relationship between the two mathematicians, “the opened vision of endless possibilities. Hardy went on to describe his friendship with Ramanujan as the one romantic encounter of his life. Also, reading Harding’s essay made me realise that a mathematician was like any other artist who creates patterns through imagination.”
It has been a long journey and for David Annen, who plays the role of Hardy, it began with an empty room, which he describes as, “large with a recording booth on one end, video artists on another and a lot of material props for some reason.”
They didn’t have a script or any dialogues to work with, but he says, “The beauty of that was that every improvisation that we did was not just with words or dialogues alone but with music and props and every other element.”
Shambu, who plays Ramanujan, literally danced his way into the production. He says, “I couldn’t act and that I only knew how to dance. I played Ramanujan’s mental state in the beginning, a dance form. And then I slowly started becoming him. I found different aspects of him corresponding to who I was.”
Simon interjects, “It was also because he is extremely good at math. That ridiculous equation Ramanujan came up with — he is the only one in the entire cast who remembers the whole of it!”
He adds that for him, it has been a journey to find comprehensiveness, “As a child I found math incomprehensible. I understood that there were five oranges, but what happened when the oranges were taken away? That is how the play emerged, from trying to understand concepts I didn’t really understand.”
He promises the play to be a lot more than a mathematical dilemma, “We want the audience to grasp the logic of arriving somewhere or the logic of emotion and relationships. To see the different elements of life brought together — just like a mathematical equation.”
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