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A Disappearing Number

A Disappearing Number takes as its starting point the story of the most mysterious and romantic mathematical collaborations of all time.

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.

Threaded through this pattern of stories and ideas are 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.

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; a physicist in CERN looks for it too. The mathematician GHHardy 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.

We are all looking. The question is who can see.

People like us who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.
Einstein

Behind The Scenes Videos
Click through to watch six behind the scenes videos with footage from rehearsals and interviews with Simon McBurney and Nitin Sawhney.

Adapted For Radio
Broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 21 September 2008.
Directed by Simon McBurney and adapted for radio by Simon McBurney and Ben Power.

Jasper Rees - The Sunday Times, 2 September 2008

For Simon McBurney, Complicite`s artistic director, this is more than just a tale of two boffins. read article

Nick Curtis - The Evening Standard, 27 May 2008

one of the most densely woven, intelligent and moving pieces of theatre of the past 20 years. read article

Nikita Lalwani - New Statesman, 23 August 2007

With touching emotion and unnerving disquietude, A Disappearing Number forces the spectator to consider the facts of love, death and belonging, within the space of his or her own personal universe. read article

Brian Logan - The Times, 20 August 2007

This is very much Complicite territory: echoes through time, connections across worlds. In McBurney`s hands, mathematical sequences become journeys through life, and numerology a means of giving substance to the unknowable. read article

Sarah Hemming - Financial Times, 28 July 2007

One morning in 1913 the Cambridge mathematician G.H. Hardy opened an unexpected letter from India. It was crammed with wild mathematical theorems... read article

Opened at Plymouth Theatre Royal in March 2007 and toured to Warwick Arts Centre, the Ruhrfestspiele Recklinghausen, Vienna Festival and the Holland Festival before playing at the Barbican in Autumn 2007. It was revived in 2008 at the Grec Festival Barcelona, UMS Ann Arbor Michigan, Festival D'Automne Paris, Barbican and Sydney Theatre.