Infinite ideas

A theatrical contemplation of infinity makes full use of industrial space.

There's science in the theatre — Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, Peter Parnell's Q.E.D., and Oxygen by Carl Djerassi and one of us. And now there is Luca Ronconi and John Barrow's Infinities. Italy's most innovative director has staged in Milan a remarkable theatro-architectonic meditation on, indeed, infinity.

Five pieces of text were written for the play by John Barrow, quoting Jorge Luis Borges, the physicist–novelist Alan Lightman and the mathematician Georg Cantor, among others. The texts are integrated by Ronconi's vision into a journey of engrossing variety. In Milan's industrial section, Bovisa, La Scala Opera company had refurbished some old buildings for its workshops. This is Ronconi's setting. Or better said, settings, for the audience moves from one space in the vast complex to another.

One begins in a bar atrium, rising eight floors: L'Albergo Infinito, or the Hilbert Hotel as mathematicians may know it, whose manager must accommodate an infinite number of guests. He rehearses different solutions and proves some theorems along the way. Next, in a windowless room, women young and old alternate between desire and dread of living forever. Elsewhere, the paradoxes of time travel are paraded around a large hangar, that has a train carriage suspended in mid-air at one end and crates of books at the other.

The actors pass through the audience, and in one effective scene, where Cantor's work and life is told, we sit at tables with students/actors from Milan Polytechnic University. Other actors walk on the tables, climb ladders, or speak suspended upside-down from a conveyor belt. Their tight face masks, black and white costumes and moving platforms are all Ronconi's hallmark.

The most successful, indeed unforgettable, of the scenes accomplishes what we thought could not be done — it recreates on stage Borges' Library of Babel. A cavernous space, several stories high, is filled with cubicles and empty bookcases, two slanted mirrors stretching them effectively to infinity. Narrators appear on passages and bridges, making a connection not only to Borges' dismal library, but also to Andrea Palladio's theatre at Vicenza.

The audience is admitted in groups of 60 to 80 every 15 minutes, and moves through the five sets in roughly two hours. Meanwhile the actors, a large cast, also rotate, adding to the sense of endless motion.

Do we learn any mathematics? Yes. Does it matter? Not at all. This is a theatre of space and time, and of ideas. It is abstract, for the dramatic moments come not in confrontation of human beings, in that silence between words and action where a gesture stretches time; rather, they come from the tug-of-war between hope and despair, or comic failure. To the mind bold enough to pursue it, we are shown, infinity promises unlimited freedom — and delivers madness.

The Piccolo Teatro production, sponsored by Fondazione Sigma Tau, ran for just three weeks in Milan, ending on 28 March. On 19 April it will inaugurate the “Ciutat de les Arts Esceacuteniques”, created by Spain's leading architect, Santiago Calatrava, in another former factory, the Nave de Sagunto in Valencia. Given the integration of theatre with setting, the play cannot be the same. One is curious to see how the Spanish director Vincente Genovès will translate Ronconi's vision into the soaring Nave, and whether the cast, coached by the Greek actress Irene Papas, will match the bravura of the Piccolo's performance.

For details on the production, in Italian, see http://www.piccoloteatro.org/infinities