A tortured genius comes to life at Berkeley City Club
‘Partition’ takes engrossing look at brilliant Indian mathematician
The small Indra’s Net Theater in Berkeley has carved out an interesting niche in specializing in plays about science and scientists. There’s a lot of food for thought in that subject matter, but rarely has it proved quite so dramatic and disturbing as the tale of Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan in Ira Hauptman’s play “Partition.”
Despite the provocative title, the play doesn’t take place during the 1947 split between India and Pakistan, but rather between the years 1913 and 1920.
Instead the title refers simply to dividing into parts, which comes up in the context of one of many innovative theorems that Ramanujan develops.
Working as an accounting clerk in Madras, Ramanujan was a college dropout with almost no training in the field of pure mathematics (a theory largely unrelated to practical mathematical applications) who yet came up with one brilliant theorem after another, but had to leave proving them to others with more formal training.
In artistic director Bruce Coughran’s tense and intimate staging at the Berkeley City Club, Heren Patel is heartbreakingly anxious as Ramanujan, besotted with the beauty of numbers but always fearful that he’s letting
his hosts in Cambridge down with his difficulty getting his mind around proofs when the groundbreaking theorems themselves come so readily to him. Humble to a fault and neglecting his own well-being, we have to watch him literally working himself to death to please his neglectful mentor, G.H. Hardy, who invited him to Cambridge.
Played with brusque eccentricity by Alan Coyne, Hardy admires Ramanujan’s seemingly instinctual brilliance but is frustrated with what he sees as the prodigy’s ignorance of traditional methodology and has little patience with social niceties that most might see as simple human compassion. His friend, Alfred Billington (entertainingly stodgy David Boyll), a classics professor who sees all of English literature as a passing
fad, increasingly acts as Hardy’s conscience, chastening him for essentially abandoning Ramanujan to feverishly work for his approval.
There’s an amusing moment when Ramanujan explains the plot of “Charley’s Aunt” to Hardy, which becomes an in-joke unintended by the playwright when we remember that Coyne starred in an adaptation of that play at Hayward’s Douglas Morrisson Theatre earlier this year.
Hauptman’s play isn’t all grim, by any means. In fact, at times it’s positively playful. Ramanujan has a charmingly friendly and informal relationship with the goddess he credits for all his inspiration, Namagiri of Namakkal, played with warmth and compassion by Avanthika Srinivasan, who also does some elegant
dances to Natarajan Srinivasan’s terrific Indian music.
Also roaming around the spirit world is the ghost of 17th-century French mathematician Pierre de Fermat, played with comical vanity by Marco Aponte, who also has a brief and awkward turn as a London policeman. When these competing influences start to face off, it provides some of the play’s most diverting moments.
Colonialism is never far from the surface in Hardy’s attitude toward Ramanujan, whose culture he sees as a significant hindrance that the younger mathematician has almost uncannily but not entirely overcome through raw talent. He likes Ramanujan and respects him to a point, but his attitude toward him is clearly paternalistic for more reasons than simple age and experience.
Rarely commented upon but often self-evident in his dismissive comments, this underlying condescension adds a more sinister tinge to what otherwise might be seen simply as a tragic mismatch of temperaments.