After the international success of Mnemonic, Complicite have once again brought science and drama together in a new theatre piece, A Disappearing Number. Both plays place scientists in the limelight, though their "scientific" content is very different: Mnemonic was based on the discovery of a Neolithic man in the Alps, and used neurology and archeology to explore notions of memory and history; A Disappearing Number focuses on our fascination with infinity, and dramatises the "mysterious and romantic mathematical collaboration" between G. H. Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The two pieces are, however, remarkably similar in plot and structure, and in their common exploration of the metaphorical and theatrical potential of scientific discourse. Moreover, they both use science as a narrative tool to explore our relation to time and mortality. This review presents them in parallel and examines the particular integration of ideas and aesthetics which characterises Complicite"s work: a tireless search for connections, and a constant translation of ideas between different theatrical languages, be they verbal, visual or musical. MNEMONIC: STAGING THE LABORATORY OF MEMORY Mnemonic is a play about memory, "[h]ow we remember, why we remember, what we remember". 1 The show was first created in 1999 for the Salzburg festival, and later revived in 2002/3. Like most of Complicite"s work, it is a devised piece: the general conception came from the company"s director, Simon McBurney, but the whole team contributed to the performance text and the play then continued to evolve through the run. McBurney describes this collaborative process as a series of "collisions": This show is being made through extroardinary and intricate collisions. Collisions between the actors who have used material from their own lives and integrated it with the show. A collision with the words of John Berger, Konrad Spindler (who wrote The Man in the Ice), Anaïs Nin, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Benoit Mandelbrot (the inventor of Fractal Geometry). … Like all Theatre de Complicite shows this is a new departure. We are searching for another form to tell our stories. 2 As a result, Mnemonic is composed of many different narrative threads which echo each other throughout the show. But two main storylines stand out, and both are enquiries into the past. The first is an archaeological investigation inspired by The Man in the Ice, the story of a Neolithic body which was discovered in the Alps in 1991. Scenes from this archaeological enquiry alternate with fragments from the journey of a young woman called Alice, who travels through Europe after her mother"s death to find her unknown father. While the archaeological team gradually constructs a story of violence and flight around the Iceman"s body, Alice travels through Germany,

Judging by the many new ventures into the genre of the 'science play' over the last few years, the surge of interest in science on stage continues unchecked. The most interesting aspect of this trend, however, is not quantity but variety, and the ways in which directors in particular are beginning to challenge the playwright-driven and biographically inflected engagements that have so far dominated science on stage. In this article we discuss two recent productions from two prominent directors: Luca Ronconi's Biblioetica, staged in Turin in February-March 2006, and Jean-François Peyret's Le Cas de Sophie K., given in Paris in April-May. The gulf between these productions and more theatrically conventional plays like Copenhagen and Arcadia is wide, and this new work represents a significant step for science plays in the direction of 'postdramatic theatre', a term used by Hans-Thies Lehmann in his groundbreaking work on the subject. We argue that for many reasons these productions suggest that the interaction of science and the stage lends itself by its very nature to the postdramatic condition.

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Many separate fields and practices nowadays consider microbes as part of their legitimate focus. Therefore, microbiome studies may act as unexpected unifying forces across very different disciplines. Here, we summarize how microbiomes appear as novel major biological players, offer new artistic frontiers, new uses from medicine to laws, and inspire novel ontologies. We identify several convergent emerging themes across ecosystem studies, microbial and evolutionary ecology, arts, medicine, forensic analyses, law and philosophy of science, as well as some outstanding issues raised by microbiome studies across these disciplines and practices. An ‘epistemic revolution induced by microbiome studies’ seems to be ongoing, characterized by four features: (i) an ecologization of pre-existing concepts within disciplines, (ii) a growing interest in systemic analyses of the investigated or represented phenomena and a greater focus on interactions as their root causes, (iii) the intent to use openly multi-scalar interaction networks as an explanatory framework to investigate phenomena to acknowledge the causal effects of microbiomes, (iv) a reconceptualization of the usual definitions of which individuals are worth considering as an explanans or as an explanandum by a given field, which result in a fifth strong trend, namely (v) a de-anthropocentrification of our perception of the world.