The Mystery of Genius

Actor-director Simon McBurney explores the ‘romantic’ relationship between mathematicians GH Hardy and Srinivas Ramanujan.

Simon McBurney is a familiar face you may not be able to place. You have seen him in The Last King of Scotland, The Golden Compass and The Duchess.  But that’s not the reason why he is hailed as a creative beast. He is the artistic director and founder of Complicite, a British theatre company known for its innovations. His play on Indian mathematician Srinivas Ramanujan, A Disappearing Number, is being performed at NCPA, Bombay, to commemorate the International Congress of Mathematicians that will be held in Hyderabad in August. Open catches up with him amidst rehearsals to understand the mystery surrounding the director and his muse.

“They’re like rats, aren’t they?” are his first words to me. Simon is transfixed by the sight of crows scrambling over an open trash bin on the road. The crows fling objects out with their beaks, in search of leftovers. It’s raining, but the monsoons haven’t caught his interest. It’s the crows. “When all other wildlife will die, only the crows will remain, they say,” he tells me. Who’s they, I wonder, but it doesn’t matter. A creative mind is at work, and I must not disturb its meanderings.

Creative people have creative answers, even for mundane questions, like what got him interested in Ramanujan, the mathematical genius. “When someone asks me where I get an idea from, I ask them why was I born? I have no idea,” he flings his hands in the air. He actually does have an idea, and he explains it punctuated by long pauses. His friend, the writer Michael Ondaatje, first spoke to him about the relationship between the two mathematicians GH Hardy and Ramanujan while discussing science and creativity. Although Simon grew up and studied in Cambridge, the university where they partnered, he had heard only of Hardy. So Ondaatje gave him A Mathematician’s Apology, an essay authored by Hardy. “It had a wonderful, short description of the relationship between Ramanujan and Hardy,” says he. Ten years later, it led him to direct A Disappearing Number.

“And now, I’m bringing the piece home,” says Simon about the Indian tour of the play. The play isn’t just about Ramanujan and Hardy’s relationship; it is a world where mathematics is a reality greater than the physical one. It is a world of interconnections. In the play, three different storylines are interconnected, at times crisscrossing. An American financial expert’s prediction that a mobile company will shortly close down leads investors to withdraw. 

This, in turn, literally leads to an Indian lady at a Bangalore call centre, whom he calls for help, losing her job overnight. 

Watching the play in a packed hall the next day, surrounded by rows of old Parsis and other well-turned folks, one finds it stifling to be honest. We have never seen such innovations on stage, both creative and clever. But the hackneyed Indian accents are distracting. On stage, a beautiful edifice has been created, powerful characters walk in and out of the storyline. But the acting doesn’t match up. Ramanujan’s character has been interpreted in a manner similar to Anil Kapoor’s in the film Ishwar. He plays a village simpleton with a strange gait and childlike way of speaking. Classical Indian dance is pushed into scenes. You are left uncomfortable—you’ve just been exoticised.

But this isn’t an ethnographic exercise. It is an artistic vision. In the play, mathematics is the key to the unknown, a greater reality. Professor Hardy, the man who recognised Ramanujan’s genius and brought him over to Cambridge, called the brief partnership they enjoyed “the romantic incident of my life”. Hardy was supposedly homosexual. But Simon interprets the term romantic here in the English literary sense. “I interpret it as a window to a world he has never seen before. He [Hardy] had an intense, intimate encounter with not just an extraordinary mathematical brain, but also an Indian way of seeing the world. Which isn’t just a belief system, I would say, it is a vision.” 

For Ramanujan, an equation was pointless until it reflected a thought of God. Knowledge, literally, came to him. Simon narrates a famous incident to illustrate his genius. When Ramanujan was asked how he reached a certain conclusion, he replied that he knew the answer would be a continued fraction. All he had to do was think which continued fraction it would be, and the answer came to his mind.

Ramanujan grew up in a culture where all empirical observation of nature led people to believe in a fundamental connection between things, believes Simon. Which isn’t the case with the West, as Nitin Sawhney, the composer for the play, pointed out to him. “Had Alexander the Great taken Aristotle with him,” says Simon, “like he proposed to, perhaps Western thought wouldn’t have been throttled by Aristotle. Perhaps we might have seen the world in a more holistic vision.” Perhaps. 

For decades, Srinivas Ramanujan has enthralled people’s imagination. Few things are more tragic than a genius who dies young. For Simon McBurney, it is the mystery of his genius that attracts people towards him. There is also a comfort in mystery. “The more I know about science and the world, the more I know I know less and less. And that for me is a wonderful aspect. As you grow older, you realise that is all impossible.”  

Simon gives the crows a long look, and goes back to his rehearsals.

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