NT Live - Complicite's A Disappearing Number - Oct. 14/10

I quite enjoyed this production. With a lot of time and location shifting (sometimes excessive), the play focuses on a modern couple (Al, an Indo-American who meets Ruth, a Brit, while she is giving a math lecture) and noted British mathematician GH Hardy and poor Brahmin math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan. The clever set opens with a lecture hall, and then the blackboard is used variously for projections as the play moves from England to India, from the past to the present.

While the historical and math aspects were quite interesting (I feel I want to read up more on Ramanujan), what I found particularly compelling was the relationship between Al and Ruth. Can't pinpoint it, but found it to be one of the more real and touching relationships I've seen in a while. And what's fascinating is how we learn of Ruth's death quite early in the play, but it's only as the play goes on and we learn more about hers and Al's relationship that we begin to feel the emotional sadness of it.

And then the play ends with a contemplation about how we are connected to the past and future--which relates to both the Indian setting (a sort-of Hindu circle of life) and the mathematical concepts of continuity--and makes things somehow less sad and more spiritual.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/61116/productions/complicites-a-disappearing-number.html

NT Live's next showing features Rory Kinnear in a modern dress production of Hamlet.

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/61133/productions/hamlet.html

---