To read the reviews yesterday for Complicite’s A Disappearing Number that opened at the Barbican last week was to discover that several critics, myself included, consider ourselves to be mathematically challenged. In my own review in yesterday’s Sunday Express, I admitted, “Since I barely scraped a C grade pass in my ‘O’ Level maths, the prospect of Complicite’s new show A Disappearing Number about the complexities (and apparent beauty) of exploring the meaning of the world through baffling mathematical equations was daunting to say the least. It doesn’t get off to a promising start as Saskia Reeves’ contemporary mathematician gives us a breathless lecture on prime numbers and different kinds of infinities. But in its parallel narratives of her journey to India, and that of the real-life story of a young Indian maths genius who came to study in Cambridge in 1914, Simon McBurney’s production provides its own proof of the infinity of theatrical resourcefulness.”
It turns out I was far from alone in my mathematical shortcomings. Susannah Clapp’s review in yesterday’s Observer came with an explanatory subheading: “Even for a maths dunce, Complicite’s latest is exhilarating” (which were presumably the sub-editor’s words, not hers); but in her actual copy, she says that Complicite’s Simon McBurney “has talked of the medieval notion of music as ‘arithmetic you can hear’, Complicite makes ideas you can see. This is so more than ever in A Disappearing Number which - amazingly, particularly to this innumerate reviewer - projects the allure of numbers.”
In the Sunday Times, the subs once again had a field day: Christopher Hart’s review came with a subheading, “Whoever thought equations could be so much fun on stage? It all adds up”, which Hart himself admits he has trouble doing. “Praise is due for the company’s efforts to make us do the math,” he says, and goes on, “You are reading the words of someone who failed maths O level. At the time, I believed it was because I had an artistic temperament. Actually, it was because I was lazy and stupid. But I was quite excited to learn from Ruth what partitions are, and that the number 200 has three million million million of them. The pleasure of sitting in a theatre and amassing pure and useless facts is not to be underestimated. Indeed, I was struck again by what a good medium theatre can be for expounding hard maths and science. Think of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen or Terry Johnson’s Insignificance.”
And reading these reviews, our readers are amassing pure and useless facts about how hopeless at maths some of us confess to being, too!
