Synopsis
A Disappearing Number
$14.99 Published by Oberon
Simultaneously a narrative and an enquiry, the production crosses three continents and several histories, to weave a provocative theatrical pattern about our relentless compulsion to understand ...
A man mourns the loss of his lover, a mathematician mourns her own fate
A businessman travels from Los Angeles to Chennai pursuing the future and a physicist in CERN looks for it too
The mathematician seeks to comprehend the ideas of the genius Srinivasa Ramanujan in the chilly English surroundings of Cambridge during the First World War
Ramanujan looks to create some of the most complex mathematical patterns of all time
Threaded through this pattern of stories and ideas are questions
Questions about mathematics and beauty, imagination and the nature of infinity, about what is continuous and what permanent, how we are attached to the past and how we affect the future, how we create and how we love
The text also features an essay by Marcus de Sautoy, Professor of Mathematics at Wadham College, Oxford, and an introduction by Simon McBurney
A Disappearing Number was an astonishing success during its run at the Barbican, London in Spring 2007, winning The Evening Standard's Best New Play Award 2007