COMPLICITE is a terrific the atre company and the group's A Disappearing Number is a terrific production. Having read that, you don't have to read the rest of this diary: the problem, though, is you can't rush and see the play because it's gone, gone, gone. Disappeared like the number.

That's the problem with our cultural scene. Here was a British production that came all the way from London with an ensemble cast and massive sets and all they get to do is four shows, of which the first is an all-invitation affair. The NCPA's Jamshed Bhabha Theatre holds about 1,100 people, so assuming full houses (the shows were sold out, I believe) just under 4,500 Mumbaikars saw it. Such a pity! Srinivas Ramanujan is just going through a rediscovery right now. At least two books have been written about him and two plays have been staged, both in England and the US.

A couple of films are ready to roll soon. There's no real reason for this since it's neither the centenary of his birth (that was in 1987) or his death (due in 2020). I suppose the interest in him comes from a very simple fact: the world gets a genius, a real genius maybe once in 50 years, and every generation discovers that genius for itself. We are discovering Ramanujan now.

There's no doubt that he was a true genius; watching Complicite's production, I suddenly thought of how similar Ramanujan was to Mozart. Both died young (Mozart at 35; Ramanujan at 32). Both were astonishingly precocious (Mozart wrote his first composition at 6 and his first symphony at 8; Ramanujan while still at school made the stunning discovery that trigonometric functions could be expressed in a form unrelated to the right triangles in which they were superficially rooted. As it happens, this discovery had already been made by a famous mathematician 150 years earlier but Ramanujan was not to know: they hadn't even started teaching trigonometry to Ramanujan's class at that point!) Finally, Mozart and Ramanujan were incredibly narrow-focused. Peter Schaeffer's' play Amadeus, later made into an Oscar winning film, portrayed Mozart's immaturity and silliness; Ramanujan had no interest except mathematics, which is why he did badly at school and didn't get a degree (doing a biology exam in college, he scribbled a few careless lines on the digestive system with the comment `This is my undigested product of the Digestion Chapter'). Yet here was a man, with no serious formal education, confounding the world's greatest mathematicians with his formulae and insights.

Would we have known about Ramanujan within GH Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician? Hardy is the man who discovered Ramanujan and became his mentor. Hardy gave the academic framework for Ramanujan's raw brilliance.

Ramanujan solved the most intractable and complex problems but no one could understand how: it was Hardy who had to work backward and find the rigorous proof that was needed to publish a paper.

In A Disappearing Number, Hardy and Ramanujan never speak to each other: their interactions are through a series of tableaux enlivened by Bharat Natyam mudras and taals which get more and more frenzied as the mathematical formulae become more and more complex.

In the foreground is a modernday story about a woman mathematician in love with Ramanujan's work and an Indian-American businessman who falls in love with her. This plays out funnily and sadly, crisscrossing with the Ramanujan-Hardy story, sometimes adding to it by showing cultural differences of another kind, sometimes getting in the way because the audience wants to know about Ramanujan, not this odd couple.

A Disappearing Number works above all as theatre. Technology is used so brilliantly that there was more than one moment when the audience reacted with a sharp intake of breath. The action is fast-moving and fluid, the theatrical patterns reflecting the complexity of mathematical patterns.

Finally Mozart again. For what did Ramanujan do but create the most divine music through numbers in his all too brief life?