ROME HAILS ENGLISH THEATRE’S  PRODUCTION OF PULITZER PRIZE WINNING PLAY 
 
 
                                                 BY FARLEY CLINTON
 
    ROME –  I have never seen a more enthusiastic audience at an opening night than the one which greeted the English Theatre of Rome ’s production of David Auburn’s Proof, on Friday, 4 December. 
 
      All the enthusiasm was justified. It is a brilliant little play, nine years old (first produced in New York in 2000) but perfectly fresh to me  – I had never even heard of it, though it won the Pulitzer Prize.
 
       It was wonderful to discover something new and (fairly) serious that was perfectly cast and perfectly directed.
 
      I say (fairly) serious because, though I was swept away when watching it, cold analysis later disclosed that the power and charm of this terrific play come out of a shrewd mixture of the strongest, most solid traditions of the U. S. commercial theatre (boy meets girl  - but there are some complications….) with a sobering look at the grueling emotional ups and downs in a small family of world-class mathematicians whose more formidable representatives can and sometimes do altogether transform rigorous intellectual disciplines of such rarefaction that hardly anyone has heard of them.  “Geniuses,” but they are ordinary people in many ways:  except that after perhaps a few weeks, or years,  of thought they supply answers to  unimaginably difficult questions that practically nobody could ask.
 
     The casting of this play was phenomenal — Jason Atkinson as a boy who loves mathematics, Katie McGovern as a girl who loved a mathematician  (her father) and came  to love mathematics, Tara Elise Thomas  as  the girl’s sister whose life has escaped that blight, and Michael Fitzpatrick as the father – a mathematician of the very first rank who, after years of serious illness (mental illness), now seems to be, up to a point, dead.  Though, like Hamlet’s father, he seems to have some curious power, in the interests of his favorite child, to revisit the glimpses of the moon.  (She thinks about him a lot.  She has flashbacks.)
      
      The character portrayed by Jason Atkinson truly venerated the deceased man of genius and his daughter is very near the verge of frenzy when it appears he may be surreptitiously removing certain notebooks which might or might not have importance for the very few who could decipher them.  Atkinson suspects there is some hidden reason for her fierce concern.  And, of course, there is. 
 
       When the secret comes out — after a friendlier, more trusting atmosphere has been established – we get the strongest first-act curtain I have seen in a long time.
 
       Later, though,  I did feel at moments that there is a serious weakness in those parts of the second act in which the privileged daughter fears that no one will believe it was she, and not her father, who solved the seemingly insoluble problems that had defeated generations of the best mathematicians in Europe.  
 
       How could she fear that?  Seriously? It seems incredible that, after what she did, she will not always be capable of handling such matters pretty well, even if she should never duplicate, or surpass, this particular achievement. (But why shouldn’t she?)
 
        It is a great role. And without an absolutely credible Cathy, extremely strong and exstremely vulnerable, this play called Proof would not exist.

         Katie McGovern has lived and worked in Rome for several years, and she has appeared three times with the Savoyards and, with this production, three times with The English Theatre of Rome.  She gave a reading as Scout in To Kill A Mockingbird. I mention  her credits without going into similar detail about those of the other  actors - and the director, Castherine Durickas – who has really done great work here, and who is only 23  -  only because of my limitations of space.

         In two words, this group was considerably more professional and had more experience than I had any suspicion of.   When I said to Gaby Ford, “This is certainly a great play, but it must be extremely hard to do --  you are so lucky to have got people who can handle it,”  she replied, “Luck had absolutely nothing to do with that.” She wanted that, and she made it happen without depending on luck