The big missing element in the evening’s equation is momentum… God’s Dice at Soho Theatre doesn’t really go anywhere
God’s Dice
Soho Theatre, London Until November 30, 2hrs 15mins
God is famously immune to test-tube analysis. But what would happen if someone could actually prove His existence, using loads of maths equations?
That’s the premise of David Baddiel’s clever – if slightly so-what-ish – new play, in which a bright Christian physics student, Edie, believes she has found the God formula.
Her university lecturer Henry, played by Alan Davies (star of Jonathan Creek and QI), is taken with this theory even though he is a convinced non-believer. He’s married to celebrity atheist author Virginia, played with a scoffing tongue by Alexandra Gilbreath, who lets him indulge the girl’s theory but warns him not to sleep with ‘Christian t*ts’, as she calls her.
Edie’s university lecturer Henry, played by Alan Davies (above with Alexandra Gilbreath), is taken with her theory that she has found the God formula even though he is a non-believer
When the girl and Henry write a book together ‘proving’ God’s existence, it becomes an internet sensation and kickstarts a religious maths cult, its followers chanting ‘the Word in the maths’.
A lot of the play involves airing ideas about multiverses, infinite possibility and whatnot. The play is very good at explaining the (to me) brain-aching nature of the quantum world in which the act of looking at something changes it, a theory Tom Stoppard exploited long ago in his play Hapgood.
Where this works best is not as an evening class (which it occasionally feels like) or as a satire about an internet Second Coming. It’s in the threat posed to the marriage of two long-term atheists by one of them gaining faith.
Baddiel gives these exchanges an emotional reality he doesn’t manage elsewhere.
Henry’s married to celebrity atheist author Virginia, played with a scoffing tongue by Gilbreath, who lets him indulge the girl’s theory but warns him not to sleep with ‘Christian t*ts’
The likeable Davies shuffles about the stage like a scruffy, ageing spaniel as the self-effacing physicist, his universe upended by his lecherous university colleague Tim (Nitin Ganatra) and the fervent believer Edie (Leila Mimmack).
The big missing element in the evening’s equation is momentum. It doesn’t really go anywhere. That said, it’s a thoughtful play and the jokes are – as Einstein might have said – relatively funny.
A Museum In Baghdad
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Until January 25, 2hrs 45mins
Rating: 
This features Gertrude Bell, explorer, archaeologist, mapper of modern-day Iraq and founder of its national museum in Baghdad. It flits between 1926 (the year of Bell’s death aged 57) and 2006, when the museum reopened after the war.
Emma Fielding plays the no-nonsense Bell. Here she spars with her bluff English colleague (David Birrell). Her scenes overlap with those involving a modern director of the museum, archaeologist Ghalia Hussein (Rendah Heywood).
But neither woman comes to full life and the modern characters tend to mouth neo-colonialist points.
Emma Fielding, above, plays the no-nonsense Gertrude Bell. Here she spars with her bluff English colleague (David Birrell)
Erica Whyman’s production – with attractive music by Oguz Kaplangi – stresses the mystic ancientness of Mesopotamia. But there’s not enough of the history-making, desert-adoring Bell, every bit as fascinating as Lawrence of Arabia.