A Theatrical Week

This week has been a theatrical week indeed - first, I saw A Disappearing Number by Complicite and then In Celebration at the Duke of York Theatre. All I can say is that London is the land of the best and the mediocre theatre in the world, respectively.

A Disappearing Number by Complicite
I was awed by the sheer creativity and imagination of this production, from the use of multimedia projections to the intricate script. Scenes are so seamlessly connected that the viewer has the feeling of watching a film. More than one time I found myself staring at the stage the same way I stare at a film screen - to see every detail of the image.

The play is essentially a biography of one of the world's greatest mathematicians, Srinivasa Ramanujan, who contributed to the field of mathematics immensely during the First World War. Ramanujan is the mathematician that introduced the famous equation n/0=∞, where n stands for any number; meaning any number divided by 0 equals infinity. However, the play actually tells the story of four people, combining fact and fiction gracefully to emphasize its ideas of beauty, simplicity, nature and mathematics. After all, nature is full of complex mathematical patterns; we all look at them, but how many of us really see them. It also deals with "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."

The acting, the staging, the music, the dance, the script - this is an extremely well done play. I would recommend it without any hesitation. In fact, if you're reading this and you're in London, you have to buy tickets now!

In Celebration
And then there was this play... It got somewhat good reviews and Orland Bloom is in it for cryin' out loud! I had to see this!

Boy, was I disappointed. First of all, the script is uninspiring and almost annoying. All characters seem like they have something to resolve with each other, but they never do! All of this tension just bubbles onto the surface creating a lot of expectation and just dies down as the lights go down on the stage. Nothing surfaces, no reconciliations are made, so no climax. The script is either one of the best real-life scripts due to its lack of dramatic resolution or one of the worst examples of theatre where there is no urgency to make the audience care about these characters or watch their lives for 2,5 hours.

Another disappointing fact is that Orlando Bloom has about 50 words during the whole play. He is cast as the silent brother, who holds so much potential to be the turning point of the play due to his mysterious silence, but gets reduced to a non-central character since nothing happens. Yes, that was the theme of this play: NOTHING HAPPENS!

Don't pay 30 quid to see it!