Stage review: A Disappearing Number, Novello

If mathematics is the primal and base language of the universe how come it is so rarefied that it has become populated by other-worlders sporting laptops, moptops and many sided dice?

The dizzying, dazzling, technical triumph of A Disappearing Number manages, as successfully as would seem possible, to grasp the digits; to reconnect those foreign blackboard squiggles with the elemental forces of nature - life, death and love.

It is a staggering feat requiring the full forces of multi-media, swirling multiple narratives, a hint of the Eastern mysticism and a performance that is more collage than drama - a "visual poem" is how production company Complicite would have it.

Having chalked up an array of awards during 2007/08 before heading off to New York, this original production is back for a very limited season

The action tells two tales that touch each then divide, multiply, add, reflect, shear and amplify to create a heady mix that is as beguiling and tantalising as the challenges of the mathematical world.

The modern tale sees a clueless hedge trader Al Cooper (Firdous Bamji) coming under the spell of maths lecturer Ruth (Saskia Reeves).

Many decades earlier the true but incredible story of maths genius Srinivasa Ramanunjan is played out. An untutored and lowly clerk from India, he spills out equations and summons up new insights seemingly from nowhere.

Brought to Cambridge by professor GH Harding, the prodigy multiplies his firepower when modern theories give his self-taught methodology a turbo boost. He comes close to the Holy Grail of a theory of everything although his method is tad instinctive for many Western tastes and his religious beliefs predict that his time is running out.

These two strings of narrative - both delicate romances in their own way - cavort like a liquid double helix. Snow storms of numbers and theories are back projected. Telephone numbers abound as do co-ordinates, an alphabetti spaghetti of algebraic equations and the infinite panoply of infinities that pervade everywhere and everything.

But the heady mix remains grounded for the layman. For every Riemann zeta function theory there is an unmade bed in a Heathrow Radisson. For every y=x/0 there is a frustrating call to BT "Barbara" in a call centre in the subcontinent. For every quest to find a new laws in a sequence of integers, there is a mirroring anguished quest for a couple to have a baby.

Performances are hypnotic and servant to form, with actors taking on many parts including the constituent parts of an equation and the ribbon of time.

There is live music, dance, song, swivelling blackboards that swallow commuters, scenes viewed from above, and an intercutting between Cambridge and India that is an optical illusion. It is such a heady brew for the senses that mouths not agape are simply taking a break from the assault of wonderment.

It all adds up to a mesmerising experience - like receiving your best ever maths lesson while you, your tutor and a large unexplained bunny called Pi race through a smorgasbord of contraindicated hallucinogens.

– From September 2010