Theatre

I’m waiting slightly nervously outside a west London pub for what (according to several PRs) will be a minor miracle of diary alignment. Since collaborating on ground-breaking theatre-group Complicite’s latest show, ‘A Disappearing Number’, director Simon McBurney and composer Nitin Sawhney have been out on their own very busy and singular orbits: McBurney previewing and reshaping his production in Plymouth, Vienna and London prior to its arrival at the Barbican next week, and Sawhney (in addition to the usual globe-trotting, film score-writing and work on a new album) fronting one of this year’s most innovative Proms with his crossover collective of Western and Indian classical musicians, the London Under Sound Orchestra.
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But despite their diverging interests (and the logistical challenge of getting them into the same room) McBurney and Sawhney have a lot in common. In their own fields they’re each known as dauntless experimenters, notoriously versatile and genre-busting. And they each have an instinct for collaboration. Under McBurney’s artistic direction, Complicite has built its reputation over the past couple of decades on astonishing emotionally and physically eloquent theatre, created out of very close ensemble work within a deep-breathing, wrap-around dramatic world. And Sawhney’s composition reaches as far as film, theatre and even virtual gaming: he hosted a free performance (by the London Symphony Orchestra) of his original score to Franz Osten’s 1929 silent film classic ‘A Throw of Dice’ in Trafalgar Square; he recently composed several hours of music for the PlayStation 3 game ‘Heavenly Sword’; and he scored ‘Fallujah’ (the site-specific anti-war play that premiered at the Old Truman Brewery); and ‘Zero Degrees’, a joint dance-music-art venture with Antony Gormley and Akram Khan which received rave reviews at Sadler’s Wells in 2005.

The math to enlightenment...(image © Joris Janbos)

When the minor miracle occurs and McBurney and Sawhney do coincide, there’s lots of catching up to do: not to mention an enjoyably random twist when Sawhney bumps into the world’s former fastest rapper (who until recently reigned supreme in ‘Guinness World Records’) downstairs in the bar. A future project with Akram Khan is being mooted, and Sawhney’s also riffing enthusiastically about the Portobello Film Festival which was held in this very pub two nights ago. His favourite short film of the festival, which he thinks is right up McBurney’s street, began with a madman grunting and making noises which, the viewer gradually realises, form the melody of ‘Air on a G String’. Is it that ability to make something out of seemingly random connections which is one of the secrets of invention? Well, that, and who you know. ‘It was Antony Gormley, a good friend of ours, who introduced us in the first place,’ says Sawhney, whose unforced enthusiasm and bright-eyed calm belie his 15 years in the music business. Sawhney’s neat, casual cool is a total contrast to McBurney, whose wild and wispy comb-over, intensely wistful, pale blue gaze, disconcerting physical grace and baggy, frayed garments give him the look of a grown-up Pinocchio. ‘I came to see Simon’s “Measure for Measure” at the National, which was just brilliant,’ enthuses Sawhney. ‘We got introduced, and found we’d both just read this book by a quantum physicist called David Deutsch, called “The Fabric of Reality”. We were chatting freely round maths and physics; I’ve always had loads of interest in Vedic mathematics, which is more than 4,000 years old, so when Simon said he was devising something about an Indian mathematician it was a no-brainer to get involved.’

The piece itself is far from a no-brainer. ‘A Disappearing Number’ tells the story of a rich and unlikely encounter, between the pre-eminent early twentieth-century Cambridge mathematician GH Hardy and the untutored Indian prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan. Ramanujan was working as a clerk for the Port Authority in Madras when he wrote to Hardy: an unsolicited letter full of compressed, original mathematical equations, expressed without proofs or workings. After concluding that Ramanujan’s superbly unorthodox theorems ‘must be true because, if they were not, no one would have the imagination to invent them’, Hardy persuaded Ramanujan to overcome his Brahmin taboo on foreign travel and come to Cambridge.

‘The mathematics of Ramanujan and Hardy,’ says McBurney, ‘is unlike applied mathematics in physics or in the free market economy. It is mathematics as art.’ But while it’s easy to grasp Sawhney’s point that ‘the aesthetic of mathematics is really how music works’, it requires a greater imaginative leap to see how Ramanujan and Hardy’s inquiry into infinity could translate into dramatic structure. ‘What Ramanujan was doing was practical and incredibly playful,’ explains McBurney, absent-mindedly building and rebuilding tottering structures out of pistachio nut shells on the table top to illustrate his point. ‘So the form of this piece has been mathematical in that it’s put together with pieces that seem arbitrary – one piece, then another piece – at first you don’t necessarily know what’s going on. But this is, in a sense, the way I always work and the intention of the show is that you can link the human story with the story of ideas.’

Like Complicite’s ravishing 1999 devised piece ‘Mnemonic’, in which the death of a prehistoric ice man was foregrounded by the story of a contemporary couple on a quest of discovery, Hardy and Ramanujan’s meeting (which Hardy described as the ‘one romantic incident of my life’) is played in counterpoint against a modern couple: a mathematician who goes travelling in search of Ramanujan’s story, and the partner she leaves behind, with a string of digits that may be a phone number to reach her in India. The partner is, McBurney says, at ‘the centre of the piece… in that he becomes aware of all its mathematical and historical and emotional ideas simultaneously over the course of one night and takes action, embedding those stories into this one story.’ It was a character that McBurney initially played, but he has now replaced himself with another actor, partly because it was ‘becoming very difficult to see the piece from the outside’ but also because it felt so ‘very very personal’. The untimely death of his colleague, friend, and star of ‘Mnemonic’, Katrin Cartlidge, is remembered in this new story of a woman who dies very suddenly. ‘When you make something,’ says McBurney, ‘there’s a deep part of yourself you tap into.’ But not all the parallels in the piece are tragic: ‘One of the things Nitin and I felt from the beginning,’ says McBurney, ‘was that it’s a story that parallels us. And it’s the story of an Indian and an Englishman, so necessarily there must be a dialogue of cultures.’

Sawhney’s whole musical experience has been built out of that dialogue between Indian and Western music: the sound-layer he made for ‘A Disappearing Number’ – in which partition in mathematics is mapped (among other things) on to the political partition of India and Pakistan – was one of the first layers to be laid down. ‘Nitin was playing around with music that started to repeat or could be turned upside down, or in which one fragment would come back in a different form,’ explains McBurney. ‘One of the first pieces he came up with was an image of Ramanujan working alone: you get this intensely repetitive music, then a snatch of choral singing on top; the suggestion of Cambridge in his sense of isolation. The musical ideas are absolutely fundamental for me: even if they then retreat into the background, for me they opened the channel of creativity, gave me a structure to play with.’

Sawhney agrees that music is an element that can come before plot. ‘Compared to other directors I’ve worked with,’ he says, ‘where people are so focused on the story they see it in isolation, Simon will make billions of connections right from the beginning; he surrounds himself with books and research and the work is so phenomenally rooted that there’s a genuine sense of organic growth.’ Complicite shows can take years to develop; they are always reworked in performance and never totally finished. So you can immediately see how apt for Complicite some of the other motifs of ‘A Disappearing Number’ are, such as the concept of infinite series, the divergence and convergence of equations on which Hardy and Ramanujan worked.

It’s intended in the piece as a metaphor for the human stories, but it’s a possible metaphor for the way in which Complicite is structured as a company too, with its associated artists free to diverge off into other work but often converging back to the source after years away. ‘Infinity was something that became for me a very fascinating subject,’ says McBurney, ‘because it has such a poetic dimension in the way we view our lives. At some point we have to confront the idea of the infinite: perhaps in its simplest form – the idea that we’re a long time dead – or the idea of physical infinity or even the infinity of all ideas.’ As an artistic mission statement, it’s the kind of thing that might sound alarmingly grandiose coming from a different director, but then Complicite does have a track record of sending even the most hard-bitten theatre critics out into the night newly hymning the human condition. For Sawhney and McBurney at least, it keys into something which is central to their inspiration and their lives, and which they believe has universal relevance.

‘I think we have a fascination with great minds,’ argues Sawhney, whose interest in mathematics as ‘the bones of the universe’ is less quixotic than Ramanujan’s (who used to claim his family goddess whispered equations in his ear) but has a similarly spiritual dimension. ‘Whether it’s Einstein, or the quantum physicists of the last century, or Newton, people who can instantly see things which we could spend our whole lifetime trying to figure out are fascinating because part of us imagines they have a connection with understanding infinity; that they may be able to figure something out that will give us an answer. And that’s something in Simon’s work that comes across strongly to me.’

It remains to be seen whether it will come across as powerfully to Barbican audiences. But it’s impossible not to find Sawhney and McBurney’s free-wheeling enthusiasm infectious. Especially when they slip from lofty subjects like Keppler’s measurement of the Music of the Spheres and the nature of mathematical reality, and spontaneously break out into a Tihai piece called ‘The Conference’ – a pulse-stirring, finger-tapping 16-beat percussive Indian counting duet, which sounds like a cross between yoga and beatboxing – and ends in self-deprecating laughter. In itself, it’s enough to prove how their points that ‘even counting aloud has an emotional charge’, and ‘the moment you begin to count you are in some sense involving the imagination’ can be communicated in performance. And if ‘A Disappearing Number’ has the playfulness as well as the intellectual scope of Sawhney and McBurney’s easy conversational jamming, it’s hard to see how audiences could not be equal to it.

‘A Disappearing Number’ returns from Oct 10 at the Barbican.