This is what it's like when world's collide.
First things first, I say next to Emma Watson at this play. OK, I never actually recognized her, but that's what I was told afterward. So I'm still going to claim I sat a few seats down from Hermoine. The night actually got more bizarre when I walked outside the theatre and it was snowing. The snow (I saw the play on October 27) was the first October snow in London in 70 years.* From start to finish, it was a bizarre couple of hours - with a bizarre play running in between.
Math and infinity are key concepts in a play about understanding called "A Disappearing Number." Last year, it won the Laurence Oliver Award (the British Tony) for Best New Play. Even though it's no Harry Potter (okay, I haven't actually read them, but whatever) the play must be rated on a scale of 1-5 Emma Watson's.
THREE OUT OF FIVE Emma Watson's.
"A Disappearing Number"
Directed and conceived by Simon McBurney
The play just finished a four-week run in London.
Two hours
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"A Disappearing Number"
By Matt Levin
A professor moves to the front of the Barbican stage at the start of "A Disappearing Number." He points out and reminds the audience how what they about to see is entirely fake. The setting is fake. The characters are played by actors. But math. Math is real, he explains. And through "A Disappearing Number's" story the play plans to prove that to the audience.
It does in essence. The problem though is it heaps piles and piles of math on you while trying to tell a coherent story. Overall it's an engaging script that's a little too dense in its themes about history and identity, love and numbers.
Simon McBurney has a complicated assignment when directing this play: Make math fun. For two hours. With no intermissions.
The plays wants to heap its math upon you, and it's relentness will leave you with both a headache, and a desire to learn more. The play weaves two stories, using 1930s Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan to tie them together. The modern day story focuses on an Indian business man, who wants nothing to do with India , and his mathematician British wife, who has an obsession with Ramanujan that her husband can't understand. Both want to start a family, and yet there's a strange rift between them.
The other tale describes the short but remarkable life of the genius Ramanujan. One of the most brilliant scenes features a chalkboard sliding back and forth on stage and each time the board rolls in front of the modern-day actors, they disappear and the Ramanujan tale reappears. Then the board will roll back, and the modern-day story will re-commence. Lighting, Indian chanting and a excellent acting also keep the play lively.
Math runs through it all. By the end, the phenomenon of math and infinity try to suggest - as both stories come to a frantic but poignant end - that there's too many coincidences in life for everything to be simply random chance. By the end, you're also feeling a bit overwhelmed.* Maybe for the engineers and doctors out there it all clicks right away. But I just wished my arithmetic was stronger, and that maybe I'd find time to see "A Disappearing Number" again.
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Foot notes
*Britain, for the record, is totally unprepared to handle snow. This is one area where London could actually learn from Syracuse. Every single thing is delayed in London at the slightest snowfall. As one Brit remarked while we waited to get on our delayed train back home: "In London, even 1/8 an inch of snow is a natural disaster."
*By the end of this review you're probably also feeling overwhelmed. Honestly, this was a tough one to review just because it was so complicated. And the plots a bit more interesting than I made it sound here. Though nothing fantastic.
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