Artistic licences
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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"A First Class Man" pulls the Hardy-Ramanujan intellectual adventure down into pseudo-spiritual pabulum and fabricated homosexual subtext.
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Freeman employs a startling degree of artistic licenCe and takes us through the trite Excruciations of an affair between Ramanujan and an Englishwoman named Esme.
Disturbing and disappointing: Stereotyping strips every character of every shred of realism.
WHEN G.H. Hardy called his discovery of, and collaboration with, Srinivasa Ramanujan "the one romantic incident" of his entire life, he didn't quite mean it the way David Freeman seems to think he did.
In Hardy's otherwise regimented, carefully structured life, Ramanujan came as a wild force of nature, upending his English notions of faith, genius and mathematics. In his play, "A First Class Man," which ran between October 5 and 21 in New York City, Freeman boils Hardy's grand intellectual adventure down into pseudo-spiritual pabulum and fabricated homosexual subtext.
Alter Ego Productions' "A First Class Man" opens in Kumbakonam, where a young Ramanujan (Amir Arison) scribbles partition theory equations in the temple of his deity, Namagiri. He doesn't just scribble, though; he begins to sway and mumble his notations in spiritual fervour.
In school a short while later, we learn that he is an absolute disaster — so it is fortunate for all concerned when an Englishman arrives in Kumbakonam and convinces Ramanujan and his widowed mother that the young genius' notebooks ought to be shown to expert eyes.
In a matter of time, Hardy (Steve French) sees some of these notes and invites Ramanujan up to Cambridge, where an army of young mathematicians sets to work proving one of his primary partition theory equations.
Sterling work
Ramanujan did some sterling work in his years at Cambridge — over 3,000 theorems, one estimate has it — but "A First Class Man" shows little of it. Instead, Freeman employs a startling degree of artistic license — or is it artistic licentiousness? — and takes us through the trite excruciations of an affair between Ramanujan and an Englishwoman named Esme. Meanwhile, in the background, Hardy lurks, moodily eyeing Ramanujan, and offering half-hearted rebuttals when a friend hypothesises that the mentor may just have developed the hots for the protégé.
Let us gracefully look past Alter Ego's casting difficulties in America, which may have necessitated the long-limbed, fair Arison to play the short, dark, pockmarked Ramanujan. Let us not cavil at the absurd Tamil accents, which must have been faithfully modelled on Mehmood in "Padosan". Let us also forgive Freeman for some glaring research flaws — in how Ramanujan's widowed mother is decked out in a bright sari and a head full of flowers, or in how a schoolmaster in the British Raj persistently uses miles instead of kilometres. Let us even forgive the acting, where Arison's Ramanujan is some sort of fevered idiot savant, and where stereotyping strips every character, apart from French's fine Hardy, of every shred of realism.
Disturbing issues
There are two crucial disturbing issues at the heart of "A First Class Man."
The first of them would have been deeply familiar to Edward Said, who, had he been sitting in the 45th Street Theater, would have nudged his neighbour and said: "You know that thing I wrote about Orientalism? Here it is, in the flesh." The prodigious genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who was composing at the age of three, is never attributed to his Christianity, but Freeman's Ramanujan is perforce painted as a spiritual mystic, doing mathematics not for its own sake but to work out some knot in his soul.
Ramanujan was certainly an orthodox Brahmin, yet even Robert Kanigel's definitive biography, The Man Who Knew Infinity, on which Freeman says he relied extensively, does not obsess with his religion to this extent. That biography, in fact, is notable for its utterly even-handed treatment of Ramanujan as man, mathematician and Hindu; Freeman's play is not.
More perplexing still is Freeman's introduction of Esme and of Hardy's supposed attraction to Ramanujan. Artistic license works only when it serves to enhance a narrative; how, then, can material that is found five times a week on "The Young and the Restless" ever hope to trump the true story of a once-in-a-century native genius like Ramanujan? The meeting of two giant minds, their synergy across cultures, the Greek-tragic, self-combusting intellect of Ramanujan, a legacy that has mathematicians working even today — was all this simply not enough? If the puerility of the incidents in "A First Class Man" had really been the ones to constitute Hardy's one great romantic experience, his must have been a singularly comatose imagination.
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