Maths is real, you and I are not

Artistic director of the UK-based theatre group Complicite, Simon McBurney turns mathematical fundas into life's philosophy, with his play A Disappearing Number

Artistic director of the UK-based theatre group Complicite, Simon McBurney turns mathematical fundas into life's philosophy, with his play A Disappearing Number

He calls his theatre group a terrorist organisation, for it's ability to respond at a very short notice and be prepared to create chaos, creatively, of course. He blushes when you tell him that the female audience of A Disappearing Number has begun to 'fancy' the play's director (he has a wife and two lovely kids waiting for him back home). He appears exhausted from non-stop travel across the world and a quick stopover in Chennai, hometown of legendary mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. But most importantly, Simon McBurney is glad to be finally performing in Ramanujan's country, three years after A Disappearing Number premiered in the UK.

A Disappearing Number has been complimented for its seamless fluidity. A lot of credit for that goes to Nitin Sawhney (music), Michael Levine (design) and Sven Ortel (projection). How was it working with them?
Honestly, that is the way I work -- I am constantly making connections between things. So when you put together two disparate elements, what is important is the connection between them. The human mind is such that if I show you a cellphone and then a table, you will make a connection. That is the nature of storytelling.
One thing I have always done with all my productions is to make connections. At times, I use cinematic language, or radio, or painting. It depends on what the subject is. So when I worked with Michael, Nitin, Paul Anderson (lighting) and Sven, they provided me with different elements and it was up to me to bring them all together. That was my function.

How do you turn complex mathematical terms -- string theory and convergent series and the cosine of half pi Z -- into a moving, powerful experience?
Let's take a simple idea, like infinity. When you die, there will be nothing of you left, and you'll turn into carbon. But when you are alive you are contained within a body. So, when you die, you die in infinity. That, you could say, becomes a human and emotional issue. Once you link the two, you start to see infinity in another way.
I am trying to show that mathematics is another reality. It obeys different laws. For example, as I look at you, I see that you are made up of cells, and those cells are made up of atoms and whirling electrons. Between those whirling electrons, there's infinite space. So, I could say that you are nothing but a mass of whirling electrons, if I like. This means that you could be different things but I don't know what those things are.
However, the number 317 is a prime number. Not because I say so, but because it is so -- because mathematical realities function that way. There is a sort of certainty in mathematics, which for many people is more real than the reality of this room we are sitting in.

Theatre groups in India are inspired by your work, particularly in the way you use technology. Who has been your inspiration?
Growing up in the 70s and 80s, I saw a lot of experimental work. I remember seeing the works of great Polish director Tadeusz Kantor. Seeing Habib Tanvir's Charandas, The Thief, in the 80s in London was remarkable. My inspirations are disparate. You could say we live in a multi-technological world. Technology is all around us. If you are a storyteller you use whatever is at hand -- that's the key. Whatever tool we are given, we use it to tell a story and that's why technology plays a significant part in A Disappearing Number.