Prime numbers can be pretty dramatic things. In David Auburn's Pulitzer Prize-winning play Proof - currently adapted for the screen and starring Gwyneth Paltrow - a young woman uncovers a remarkable proof for an unsolved mathematical problem concerning these perplexing numbers. The impact of this discovery shakes the mathematics faculty at her late father's university to its foundations. And it threatens to destabilise both her family and her own fragile mental state.
The rarefied world of mathematical research may not seem an obvious place to find drama. But Auburn is not alone in his quest to draw a narrative thread out of the complex web that subjects such as this weave. The twin strands of mathematics and science have long provided a fertile ground for dramatists seeking to explore moral, emotional and psychological questions. At the core of many of these plays lies the figure of the tormented genius. While Catherine, Paltrow's character in Proof, has only to contend with the consequences of her brilliance for her own mental health, others have been less fortunate.
Probably the most famous equation in history is that discovered by a young patent clerk working in the Swiss city of Bern in 1905. Einstein demonstrated his brilliance by equating mass and energy in the iconic formula E=MC2. The consequences of this one equation have cast a mushroom- shaped shadow over everything that has come since. In his play Insignificance, Terry Johnson depicts the older Einstein as having hidden himself away in an anonymous hotel room.His seclusion is not just an attemptto avoid the prying eyes of Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Fundamentally he is trying to hide from his own mind. He works compulsively on his calculus, destroying it each time it is finished. When pressured to explain this self-imposed seclusion his only reply is: "We burned children". The moral responsibility forced on him by his own genius has become too much to bear.
Terry Johnson is not the only playwright to find the core of a good drama in the kind of predicament that Einstein faced. Howard Brenton's 1983 play The Genius tells the story of a fictitious young American mathematician named Leo Lehrer. A Nobel laureate, Lehrer exiles himself from America when the Pentagon begins to take too great an interest in his research. He winds up in a redbrick British university, where, to his horror, he discovers that a female student has stumbled on the same explosive equations that he did. But his attempts to dissuade her from her work flounder as she argues that "a thought is a thought". "You can't not have it," she declares. "If men in America with blue eyes do something horrible with the equations - I don't care. I can't."
However, it is Michael Frayn's play Copenhagen that most rigorously embodies the moral and philosophical dilemmas facing the scientific project. Frayn imagines a final encounter between the physicists Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr. Their friendship had been torn apart as Europe went to war in the early 1940s. And the two men found themselves on opposite sides of the race to split the atom and to build the first atomic bomb.
The play is loaded with the jargon of quantum physics, which evokes a profound sense of the ambiguity and paradox that lie at the heart of the men's scientific lives. As they relive a heated argument about matrix mechanics, Bohr cries: "You've never been able to understand the suggestiveness of paradox and contradiction. . . you live and breathe paradox and contradiction but you can no more see the beauty of them than a fish can see the beauty of water." In the laboratory of the theatre, the pursuit of science - the ceaseless quest for truth - can be laid bare in all its complexity.
The conflict that arises when there is doubt lying at the heart of the search for fact is inherently dramatic. Scientific progress is not simply the gradual, methodical and linear unveiling of the universe by empirical means. Rather it is as much the result of the passions and prejudices of its practitioners. In his memoirs, Heisenberg wrote that he hoped "to demonstrate that science is rooted in conversations". The personalities of the interlocutors and the way they react to one another are of critical importance. In the play Heisenberg puts it differently: "Mathematics becomes very odd when you apply it to people. One plus one can add up to so many different sums." Science and theatre seem on the face of it to be pursuing quite separate ends: the former, the mathematics of the physical world; the latter, the mathematics of the human world. But science, whatever its occational pretensions to the contrary, is still part of the human world.
So if theatre is adept at exploring the big moral and existential questions of science, what of its capacity to explore the specifics of scientific discovery? Carl Djerassi, professor of chemistry at Stanford University and inventor of the contraceptive pill, has spent the past nine years writing plays about science. For him, the theatre can be a meansto "smuggle scientific facts into the consciousness of a scientifically illiterate public". His latest play Taboos, which opened at London's New End Theatre last week, deals with the consequences of modern forms of artificial fertilisation for two couples. The play certainly manages to "smuggle in" a great deal of information about the techniques themselves. But it is far more interesting for the way it deals with the emotional traumas that these cause for the individuals involved. It is this conflict that makes for good theatre, not the lecture in disguise.
The best example of how a play can communicate a particular scientific idea is London's Soho Theatre's recent production On Ego. Born of a collaboration between its director Mick Gordon and the neuropsychologist Paul Brok, it seeks to explain "bundle theory". This is Francis Crick's "astonishing hypothesis" that we are "nothing but a pack of neurones". Or as Alex, a character in the play puts it, our consciousness is made up of "nothing but material substance: flesh and blood, bone and brain. . . There's no one there, no essence, no ego, no 'I'." The play works, not simply because it explains these ideas, but rather because, in the relationship between Alex and his brain-damaged wife, the huge implications of this theory are graphically demonstrated for us. The very structure of the play reflects the emotional and psychological dilemma that such an apparently counterintuitive theory poses for us as human beings.
Towards the end of Auburn's Proof, Catherine says of her extraordinary and complex mathematical solution: "All I can see are the compromises, the approximations, places where it's stitched together. It's lumpy." It is precisely these lumps, so frustrating for the scientist, that are so inspiring for the dramatist. And it is why the convergence between the worlds of the laboratory and of the theatre will continue to make for such compelling viewing.
