Marcus du Sautoy on the mathematician who led a charmed life, after being mistaken for a Russian spy
The Axiom of Choice
at the Oxford Playhouse
on Monday, November 11 and Tuesday 12
Review by JON LEWIS
The Prime of Life
According to the post-show discussion, when he was a PhD student Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford Professor of Mathematics, attended Oxford’s Pegasus Theatre workshops with the newly established Theatre de Complicité.
Several decades later he became advisor to the company for A Disappearing Number about the relationship between GH Hardy, a predecessor of du Sautoy’s and the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
Now, with the support of the Oxford Cultural Programme, du Sautoy has written a play about the French Jewish mathematician Andre Weil (Joseph Prowen) in which his meeting with Ramanujan (Shipra Jain) in India is significant.
The cast notably includes regular Complicité actor Clive Mendus playing a multitude of roles.
Co-directed with Lu Descourtier in a fluid physical style reminiscent of Complicité, the play begins with a discussion about nothing. Out of nothing, or as the play implies with a witty theatrical pun, out of an empty set, the four actors, wearing identical costumes, emerge one by one as if in a maths equation. They play Weil’s fictitious character Bourbaki, a name chosen for Weil’s collective of French mathematicians.
The dialogue fizzes with difficulty like in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers, scenes bursting into life, actors creating a nought by blowing through the fingers.
Weil discovers on a visit to Ramanujan that the world’s first example of a zero is in a temple in India. The set (designer, Bronwen Herdman) is cleverly constructed out of different geometrical wooden shapes, one moment a prison cell in Rouen where Weil is on trial for refusing to fight against the Nazi invasion of France, the next a train compartment in Finland which he shares with a Soviet physicist.
Weil led a charmed life, since the passive academic was mistaken for a Russian spy. His sister, Simone (TJ Sulaiman, making an impressive professional debut), a philosopher, is unlike Audre, an advocate for direct action – helping mine workers, and then taking the fight to the Nazis.
Weil is given a life-or-death choice at his trial: to fight or stay in prison where he wants to solve a famous maths problem.
An intriguing, fascinating production about decision-making.