In school we were always told to choose between science and arts. Be it in the classroom, or even after school activities. This binary ingraining often results in a lack of exposure to the other form. Children are told to be either empirical or artistic. Very rarely are they allowed to be both. Maths, in particular, was the dreaded subject for all of us budding theatre-wallahs.
That’s perhaps why I find it marvellous that two plays about Maths are being staged in the next few days in Bombay.
The first is a one-woman performance, directed by Mohit Takalkar for the Prithvi Theatre Festival on November 11. Written by Gowri Ramnarayan, Mathemagician tells the story of young mathematician in Babylon in 500CE. The play charts the rise and fall of a man with an affinity for numbers, but at its heart it is still a human story. In a sense it is similar to other plays that have dealt with maths. Disappearing Number, Complicite’s 2007 opulent production about Ramanujan and his mathematical relationship with G.H. Hardy. While the play did centre on maths as a larger theme, it was primarily about human being obsessed with maths. David Auburn’s Proof and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia both employ maths to great effect, when actually telling very universal human stories.
That’s what makes the second play to be featured in the next few days so different. X&Y will be playing at the Tata Literature Live on November 17 and 18 at NCPA and Prithvi, respectively. The play is about the relationship between maths and theatre. Conceived by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, who also worked on Disappearing Number, the play featured him alongside Victoria Gould. X and Y are two characters that are trapped in a world they don’t understand, and confronted for the first time with another human being. It is a story of contrasting world views. X lives life through mathematical abstraction, lonely but happily confined to a cube he never leaves. Y has spent her life exploring their known universe, hoping that she’ll finally find an “out” and an answer to the universal question: “Is there more than this?”
Together they attempt to tackle some of the more complicated philosophical and scientific questions; such as where did the universe come from, does time have an end, is there something on the other side, do we have free will, can we ever prove anything about our universe for sure or is there always room for another surprise?
Using mathematical concepts such as string theory, they tell a story about relationships and maths; not just one or the other.
Given Bombay’s recent obsession with Albert Einstein in Motley’s Einstein and AmyGo’s The E.Q., it feels like the city’s audiences are ready for another onslaught of numbers. Perhaps finally schools will realise you can love both science and arts, and don’t actually have to choose one. In fact in X&Y, it’s maths plus philosophy; now that’s a heady combination!
The author is a Bombay based theatre-holic. He works primarily as a theatre-director for arts management company QTP, who also manage the youth theatre movement Thespo.
