This is a gem of a production that needs to be seen. A Pulitzer-winning play from 2000, David Auburn’s script mines the dysfunctional American family with the extra bite and zest of mathematics, academic ambition, and a lot of references to hard-core partying maths geeks. It is the directorial debut of Joseph Houston, co-founder of Manchester’s award-winning Hope Mill Theatre, and their first non-musical in-house production.
Lucy Jane Dixon’s performance as university mathematics drop-out Catherine is superb. From the moment she is first discovered slumbering on her twenty fifth birthday on the back porch of her father’s old house in Chicago, she is onstage in almost every scene, and her brittle, vulnerable, yet luminous energy manifests through multiple layers of nuance as the play flashes back and forth in time. Her father, a brilliant mathematician, has just died. He had been suffering mental illness for many years. Among his houseful of notebooks filled with gibberish is one notebook that contains forty pages of an exciting new mathematical proof that will have reporters flocking to the house. How could this proof have come into existence? And, as one particularly pointed scene towards the end makes clear, why is it that young women get so incredibly under-estimated?
The side-story of Catherine’s relationship with her older sister Clare is played out with bombastic richness by Angela Costello. Clare has inherited only a thousandth of her father’s mathematical talent, but it’s enough to give her an affluent life as a currency analyst in New York, and she wants her drifting younger sister to move out there with her – to study, to work, to do anything except stay in bed all day. Catherine does not want to go. Catherine has inherited a bit more than a thousandth of mathematical talent. Catherine’s bags are packed for her when Clare very quickly sells the house. And then the notebook turns up.
In able support is David Keller as Robert, the recently-deceased fifty-something father who shambles well-meaningly across the porch at various intervals, caught between his deteriorating brain and the glory days of his youth when he was nationally feted as a genius. The twenty-something hotshot of today is played with just the right amount of condescension by Samuel Holland as Hal, on the surface an earnest and gawky mathematician who performs in a really bad rock band... but underneath, not too adverse to the thought of being nationally feted himself. Even if it’s by proxy. Via someone else’s notebook.
Stunning set design by Frankie Gerrard, showing a semi-realistic house and porch of silvery-grey driftwood that, under ultraviolet lights, becomes covered in mathematical graffiti. Costumes also by Gerrard, in muted pastel colours that give a further impression of being in a world that is not quite real, not quite formed, and not quite “proven.” Joseph Thomas’ lighting design veers from the naturalistic, bringing changing seasons and even some delicate snow in moonlight to the stage, to the harshly dramatic, assaulting the audience’s retinas with blazing back-lighting that has no mercy. Dan Pyke’s sound design brings a sonic boom to each back-lit blaze. And Manny Crook’s accent coaching has the actors chewing their way through Auburn’s dialogue in authentic nasal and hard-edged Chicago accents.
Hope Mill Theatre was opened in Manchester with the ambition of rivalling the Off-West End theatres of London. In “Proof”, that ambition is well and truly realised.
Reviewer - Thalia Terpsichore
on - 27/11/18
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