Mathematics of the Heart, Theatre 503

Science rocks. In the theatre, this is a subject that offers to provide powerful experiments in metaphor. Most recently, in Nick Payne’s Constellations - and most classically in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy - the world of quantum mechanics, cosmology and chaos theory suggests ideas about the randomness of our daily lives. And there is nothing quite so random as love.

In the appealingly titled Mathematics of the Heart, Dr Paul MacMillan – a bearded boffin from Middlesex University – has a problem. He is a professor of chaos theory, and his specialism is storm patterns, but he is taken aback when it rains. And other aspects of his life seem equally difficult to predict. His father, who was a mathematician more eminent than his son, has just unexpectedly died, and his brother, the aptly named Chancer, is occupying the spare room of his flat.

Can Paul cope with his father’s legacy?

At the same time, his girlfriend Emma, a 38-year-old solicitor, is finding it difficult to get Paul to commit. Her biological clock is ticking. She doesn’t share his flat and, at the start of the play, comes over and is surprised to find Paul with Zainab, a twentysomething PhD student who looks stunningly attractive. But Emma doesn’t have to worry; Paul’s head is in the clouds. Things only begin to hot up when Chancer, a rangey, reggae-loving free liver and loafer, decides to make a move on Zainab.

Set in Paul’s London flat, the story playfully begins with Paul and Emma opening the biggest of several boxes of his father’s possessions. It contains a build-it-yourself blue boat. It is a symbolic legacy, which evokes Paul and Chancer’s childhood, and it also sets a challenge. Will Paul, who has no skill at handicrafts, be able to construct it? Can he cope with his father’s legacy? How will Emma react to life with a boat?