A Disappearing Number - Final Performance

Lyn Gardiner’s Guardian(15 Sept 2010) review of A Disappearing Number is a joy to read:

Everything adds up beautifully in Complicite's exquisite meditation on maths, love, grief and the way the past is linked to the future and the living to the absent. The show has mellowed and deepened since it was at the Barbican in 2008. The staging still has a fluid sleight of hand, as if director Simon McBurney has taken GH Hardy's belief that the mathematician, like the poet or a painter, is a maker of patterns, and applied it to his own art. But while you gasp at the stagecraft, the production now seems to allow more room for its entwined stories to breathe.
At its centre are two love stories: the affection of Hardy for the self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, a lowly clerk in Madras whose discoveries have shaped modern maths; and the relationship between Ruth, a maths lecturer, and Al, an American of Indian descent who deals in futures. Ruth and Al want to build a future for themselves, but Ruth's biological clock is ticking as loudly as the one in her lecture theatre.
McBurney has always had a gift for turning ideas into visual poetry and making the abstract concrete, and this swirling couple of hours is like watching a juggler keep all the balls aloft, with help from a superb cast. It's not just dazzling theatre, but wise and comforting. Picking up the threads of the company's masterpiece, Mnenomic, it suggests we are all linked to one another, even – or perhaps especially – in death.

I loved the opening sequence of last night’s National Theatre Live’s movie broadcast of “A Disappearing Number”. The play began with Ruth Minnen (Saskia Reeves) writing whole numbers on a blackboard. She was into her fifth sequence begun David Annen, not in his G.H. Hardy character, but as interloper on the stage got between her and the audience, to point out who the characters in this play were. and what is about to happen to all of us, now that he has put us in the mode of imagining together. And that thin, he promised, was something that is grande than even the beauty of maths.

The opening sequence involved audience participation. “Think of a number. Double it. Add 14. Divide by 2....” And soon everyone in the audience arrived back to the number they began with .A magical trick with numbers done first in my childhood past. Sleight of hand? None of that was the point. The actor was drawing all of us in, helping us to imagine, imagine together, all of us connected in a pattern that would help us think about interconnectivity. We were about to imagine real people, not actors, landscapes, not theatre sets. Interconnectivity, not loneliness

The play was conceived by Simon McBurney who was interviewed before the performance began. “Maths was so difficult I would break out in a sweat before entering the class room.” But it was the poetics of maths that was about to be revealed.

The technique of having an actor speak to the audience, out of character, is a charming device -- to have an actor who is both inside and outside of the play be at once, on stage, teasing new interest in maths from his audience and at the same time, acting for us. Yes. He was prevaricating. He was on stage, we knew he was part of the play, even though he professed not to be part of what we are about to see. Soon that extra persona leaves us. He becomes what he says he will be, part of the internal story, a G.H. Hardy character for us, though we continue to hear his omniscient voice present as he pushes the narrative along during the evening.

A charming opening sequence.

As an aside, I was surprised to see the theatre – empty when we walked in and when the play started, only a sprinkling of people in the auditorium. Maybe only 20 people.

National Theatre Live hasn’t caught on like Live from the Met has ... yet.

Arta