Everything adds up beautifully in Complicite's exquisite meditation on maths, love, grief and the way the past is linked to the future and the living to the absent. The show has mellowed and deepened since it was at the Barbican in 2008. The staging still has a fluid sleight of hand, as if director Simon McBurney has taken GH Hardy's belief that the mathematician, like the poet or a painter, is a maker of patterns, and applied it to his own art. But while you gasp at the stagecraft, the production now seems to allow more room for its entwined stories to breathe.
At its centre are two love stories: the affection of Hardy for the self-taught mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan, a lowly clerk in Madras whose discoveries have shaped modern maths; and the relationship between Ruth, a maths lecturer, and Al, an American of Indian descent who deals in futures. Ruth and Al want to build a future for themselves, but Ruth's biological clock is ticking as loudly as the one in her lecture theatre.
McBurney has always had a gift for turning ideas into visual poetry and making the abstract concrete, and this swirling couple of hours is like watching a juggler keep all the balls aloft, with help from a superb cast. It's not just dazzling theatre, but wise and comforting. Picking up the threads of the company's masterpiece, Mnenomic, it suggests we are all linked to one another, even – or perhaps especially – in death.
