ABSTRACT
With his 2007 piece of technological storytelling, A Disappearing Number, Simon McBurney (b. 1957), in musical collaboration with Nitin Sawhney, crosses the Hindu Kush to go deep into Tamil Nadu to trace the odyssey, life, work and death of the Indian mathematician, Srinivasa Ramanujan. In so doing he provides further evidence of Complicite’s internationalist shifts in the twenty-first century. Eastward, with the company’s work building, with Shun-Kin (2008), on a previous partnership with the Japanese Setagaya Public Theatre in the highly acclaimed The Elephant Vanishes (2003). Westward too, in collaboration with the Los Angeles Philharmonic in Strange Poetry (2004); the National Actors’ Theatre, New York, with Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (2002) starring Al Pacino and satirising George Bush; a political charge driven home on Broadway at the time of Obama’s historic victory with his radical staging of Arthur Miller’s All My Sons (2008). Though Gorbachev dreamed of a new Europe stretching to the Urals, Complicite’s shape-shifting internationalism as evidenced in the work after the Soviet-set The Noise of Time (2000) has now spread its artistic wings to soar far beyond that terrain.
