Theatre

An infinity of infinities is as big a topic as you can get, but Complicite, a company that likes to boldly go where no company has been before, is fascinated by both numbers and space while also exploring the connections between different times and cultures. But don’t run away: you don’t need a degree in either maths or physics to understand what they’re on about. Even if, like me, your knowledge of maths amounts to little more than counting your change, it’s still possible to understand the appeal of certain numerical sequences. As in the company’s ‘Mnemonic’, a simple opening exercise binds the audience together before mathematics professor, Ruth, excitedly scribbles a whole series of impenetrable equations on her white board. Her sexual awakening and coupling with an Asian-American dealer in the futures market is linked and contrasted with the relationship between GH Harding and Srinivasa Ramanujan, a self-taught maths genius, who at the start of the twentieth century abandoned his Brahmin principles to cross the world to work with Hardy in Cambridge.

In a show conceived and directed by Simon McBurney, Nitin Sawnhey’s music, the projected equations that ripple across the stage,  and the movement of the actors illustrate Hardy’s description of mathematicians as ‘makers of patterns like poets or painters’. People disappear under Ruth’s revolving board as if vanishing into infinity. Saskia Reeves is touchingly vulnerable and passionate as Ruth, passing on the excitement of Ramanujan’s discoveries to her students, just as Hector in ‘The History Boys’ describes how readers and writers can connect across the generations. Her husband shares our numerical handicap while, in a running joke, also trying to cope with an enthusiastic call-centre worker in India.

The relationship between Ramanujan and Hardy is more problematic mainly because the presentation is sketchy and we don’t learn enough about their friendship. Otherwise, adding Complicite’s dazzling stagecraft to the mysteries of mathematics  amounts to a show that must be seen.