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I found it to be funny, insightful and interesting as a new work
London,
A Disappearing Number
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Barbican Theatre
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Silk Street, EC2Y 8BQ
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Dir: Simon McBurney.
Cast: Firdous Bamji, Paul Bhattacharjee, Chetna Pandya, Saskia Reeves
Description: A new devised theatre piece from Complicite, a provocative tale of imagination and identity, taking its starting point from the true story of a famous mathematical collaboration between a poor South Indian and a Cambridge don. Directed by Simon McBurney, with music by Nitin Sawhney.
Trains: Tube/BR: Barbican/Moorgate 
Phone: 0845120 7550
Website: www.barbican.org.uk
Email: info@barbican.org.uk
Extra info: Parking, Pub, Food
The magic of maths
By Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard 12.09.07
East and West: Shane Shambhu and David Hannen as academics united by their love of mathematics
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This extraordinary, beautiful piece of theatre, the latest Simon McBurney has created and directed for his Complicite Company, is inspired by mathematics and metaphysics. The central focus is on real-life people: a 26-year-old Brahmin clerk, Srinivasa Ramanujan working in Madras, and the Cambridge mathematician Godfrey Hardy who corresponded with him and realised he was dealing with a visionary mathematical genius.
It is hard to imagine a more daunting theatrical subject. McBurney has, though, a flair for risky creative leaps in the dark and despite its cerebral cargo A Disappearing Number is freighted by an attractive, brooding romanticism.
This superlatively acted production captures minds and hearts. Its dazzling stage-craft whisks us with cinematic speediness between England and India, between the early 20th century and the 21st. The sense is of being caught in a linear-defying dreamscape. A montage of video-film images - from an Indian river in dusky black and white to a Cambridge college - together with an aural score of recorded voices, dramatic sounds, outbursts of music from John Adams to Victor Silvester, shifts of lighting and backcloth of numerals floating like cells under a microscope, all enhance that impression. We are never required to understand what is a mathematical proof or why there are many types of infinitity.
For McBurney broods more about life's higher purposes than higher mathematics. He presents two mathematical narratives that run in contrasted parallel. Saskia Reeves's dowdy, fortyish, contemporary lecturer in mathematics is touchingly surprised by eros in the unlikely shape of a smart, Indian-American financier and marries her. Hardy coaxes the innocent, unworldly Ramanujan briefly to a racist England and Cambridge for East-West mathematical collaboration.
The play's title is poignantly telephonic, since it refers to the contemporary lecturer's telephone number, one her husbands wants to retain: both 20th and 21st century mathematicians die tragically young. Their deaths raise questions about the purpose of life.
McBurney describes mathematics as being about enduring ideas, about the making of patterns - those discovered by Ramanujan are now reckoned crucial to understanding the string theory that physicists believe may explain the Universe. Ramanujan triumphs posthumously.
Miss Reeves's mathematician, in a fine, romantic vision of her bones mingled with those of her husband, discovers another, humbler pattern of lovers at first separated by death, but transcendent when in graves united.
• Until 6 Oct (0845 120 7550).
Read the latest reviews from Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard
Details are correct at the time of publication - please check with venue before booking.
Reader reviews (1)
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This morning I woke up in a sweat. After a grizzly dream. Director and whole cast of the Complicite theatre had been found horrifically slaughtered in their beds. A scene too gruesome to describe. Literally torn to pieces. As if a pack of wild beasts had got to them. Then I watched a pasty-faced, Hilary Clinton look-alike pundit on the BBC News stunning viewers by suggesting the culprit was… a Hindu deity! Fellow called Narasimha. A lion-god, in fact. Why was he so mad at the wretched thespians? Simple. He was acting at the instigation of his wife, the angry goddess Namagiri. Toujours cherchez la femme, indeed!
Murder can never be glorified, of course. Yet, this Christian priest must confess to a sneaking empathy with Namagiri’s hurt feelings. Complicite has foolishly provoked her. In their play, A Disappearing Number, showing at the Barbican theatre. About the Indian mathematical prodigy, Ramanujan. Namagiri’s beloved pupil and protégé’. Goddesses do not take kindly to being ignored. A lesson even dumb atheists have to learn, sometimes.
Why has Complicite replaced Namagiri with an insipid female maths lecturer? Absurdly irrelevant to the theme? I fear director McBurney has tried to be 'inventive' but bydoing so he has only proved his utter lack of true imagination. No wonder the goddess has wreaked revenge...
- Frank Gelli, London, UK
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