Endless acclaim

Professor Barrow was asked to write the play by Teatro Piccolo's new director, Sergio Escobar, as part of a programme of scientific drama proposed to him by Dr Pino Donghi of the Sigma-Tau Foundation, the charitable wing of one of Italy's leading pharmaceutical companies. Donghi knew that Luca Ronconi was looking for adventurous new ideas for the theatre and encouraged John Barrow to prepare a script. A symposium devoted to the production that resulted was the centrepiece of Sigma-Tau's science programme at the Due Monde Festival in Spoleto in July.

"Infinity seemed like a good concept to explore in a play because most people feel surprisingly familiar with it at some level and story-telling seemed like a good way to explore some of its more interesting and off-beat implications," said Professor Barrow.

"Other attempts to introduce science into the theatre are almost always human dramas that involve scientists. The science is almost incidental. And most attempts to popularise scientific ideas do so by means of explanation liberally mixed with analogy. Here the strategy was quite different. We immersed the audience in alternative realities in which the counter-intuitive features of infinity were made as large as life. Luca Ronconi's genius was to create on stage the extraordinary scenarios that we had planned, and this require the exploitation of the unique theatrical space available at the Teatro la Scala in Milan."

The play is organised in five separate scenarios, spectacularly realised by Ronconi, each exploring a different aspect of infinity. The first is set in the Hotel Infinity which, even when it is full still has room for more guests, creating problems for both staff and customers. The second scenario is about living forever, exploring the the social and human implications of infinite life for everything from life insurance and religion and the perils of making a decision when you can get plied with advice from every past generation of your family. The action takes place mostly above the audience.

The third is a universe where nothing is original and is set in a labyrinth in which is explored the strange conclusion that in an infinite universe everything that can take place with a finite chance, must take place somewhere. The fourth scenario focuses on Georg Cantor, the man who invented our modern concept of infinity. Set in a mysterious hospital it takes the form of a dialogue and psychoanalysis of Cantor in which he talks about strangeness of infinity the different varieties of and the hostility he faced from other mathematicians who wanted these dangerous concepts kept out of their subject. The fifth scenario is about the paradoxes of time travel and of where the play came from in a world where the author might have learned of it in the past from someone else who learned it from him today.

A massive production involving a cast of 65, including 15 professional actors and 50 drama students. The play has been performed in cavernous spaces which provide a physical sense of infinity. The audience is admitted in groups of 60 to 80 every 15 minutes - the first part of the audience views the first scenario and when they move on to the next scenario a new audience replaces them, until there are five separate parallel audiences and each of the five scenarios are playing simultaneously. By the end of the Milan run it was necessary to perform eight complete productions each evening to try to meet some of the huge demand for tickets.

The Italian production attracted an audience of more than 45,000 people during its three-week run and will return to Milan next Spring. It was also produced in Spanish where it inaugurated the Ciutat de les Arts Esceniques of Valencia in May, an event described by the Spanish Minister of Culture as 'the highlight of Spanish presidency of the European Union.'