Benedict Nightingale
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Complicite’s magical mystery tour of the maths world won most of the 2007 theatrical awards, and now here it is again in what we’re told is a revised version. But I can’t say that I noticed any difference in the production that was “devised” by its company and “conceived and directed” by the director Simon McBurney. From the moment a nerdishly excited Saskia Reeves appears to plaster a whiteboard with digits, fractions and symbols from beta to psi, I was as hooked as last year.
Not just mentally hooked either. Though I now understand better what “partitions” are, and semi-comprehend how an infinite series of numbers adds up to minus one twelfth, it’s the human equations that held me captive, along with a seemingly rapt audience consisting largely and surprisingly of teenagers. Take an untutored clerk from the Madras Port Authority called Srinivasa Ramanujan. Add the brilliant Cambridge don G. H. Hardy. Together they equal ideas, approaches, theorems, some of which have yet to be fully explored.
So the main plot concerns Shane Shambhu’s podgy, trudging, humble yet inspirational Indian and David Annen’s prim but open-minded Englishman touchingly forging a bond which, though earnestly platonic, is remembered by Hardy as the most “romantic” of his life. But there’s a second plot, involving Reeves’s attractive geek and Firdous Bamji as the Indian-American financier who falls for her. There are parallels between the stories, among them a premature death, and, especially in the second, a sense of frustration as well as fulfilment.
Accordingly, much is made of the series of diminishing fractions, which start with one but never quite become two. There’s always something elusive, a “disappearing number” in relationships as in maths. But wherever you look you find tantalising connections and evidence of the two things that make Complicite the remarkable troupe it is: an exhilarating curiosity about life and the bravura theatrical imagination that can suddenly transform a hotel bed into an iceberg visible from the plane that’s just been a train, a Cambridge high table, anything. And to them this show adds a third: heart.
Box office: 020-7638 8891, to Nov 1 2008
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