If your memories of David Auburn's Tony Award winning examination of genius and sanity stretches no further than the somnambulant movie starring Gwyneth Paltrow then you've been shortchanged.
Make up for lost time. This spiky and combative battle of wit and manipulation is, in the hands of Sell A Door, feisty and invigorating.
Quips, jibes and jousting are the two hours' passage of the play as Catherine fights to prove she's a worthy daughter to her revered, if ultimately insane, maths guru of a father.
Has she winnowed his genes to preserve the intellectual clarity or is she left with a residue of degenerative delusion?
Maths underachiever Hal, with the sweet self-deprecating irony of a nerd-in-a-rock-band fosters a charitable view while her spiky, streetwise sis Claire fears the worst. Yet both come to question their calculations.
For, in the midst of this, with the fizzing attitude and grizzle of a grounded teen on prom night, mercurial Catherine confounds expectations. She knows her own mind even if her own mind happens to be as elusive and skittish as a polecat's shadow.
In David Hutchinson's production, all eyes are on charismatic Amy Burke as Claire who brutalises and seduces her foes, but there are equally strong showings from Holly Easterbrook as fractious but fleet-footed Clare and Dan Cohen as a semi-skimmed suitor Hal. Marcus Taylor plays Dad as Max Headroom in meltdown mode.
Thrown together to sort out the living from the dead, the maths from the madness, the bitching from the Bigger Picture, the algebra from the alphabetti spaghetti, this quartet make for an electrifying evening that crackles with weight and wit.
– From May 2011
