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DO YOU want to live for ever? If you stopped and thought it through, you might answer no. Picture yourself among those doomed to life without end. Do you become manically active and seek to accomplish everything? Or do you see the future of unending tomorrows as a good reason to do nothing today? What do you make of religion that promises everlasting life? How does your community decide on appropriate punishment for crime when your only choice is either depriving someone of an infinite future or locking them up for an insignificant few years of an infinite lifespan? Then there are the perils of making a decision when you can be plied with advice by every past generation of your family…

In my play Infinities, the audience confronts these issues while old crones in chairs glide along monorails above the audience. This scene, set in a rest home for those who must live for ever, is just one of five in the play, each dealing with some aspect of the infinite. In December 2002 Infinities received the Italy’s most prestigious theatre prize, the Premi Ubu, for best play in the annual Italian Theatre Awards – its most prestigious award. The Italian production attracted a total audience of more than 35,000 and will probably return to Milan for a third season next spring. The infinite, it seems, has a surprisingly human appeal.

Despite its intersection with all manner of deep and paradoxical matters of mathematical, philosophical and theological significance, infinity is strangely familiar to us all. Everyone you might meet in the street or on a theatre seat would feel comfortable with the idea. It is the acceptable face of the unintelligible, made so by our religious traditions and penchant for exaggeration. And so, although it is an almost unique abstract idea, infinity makes immediately appealing subject matter for a writer.

I wrote Infinities at the invitation of Pino Donghi, director of the science-promoting Sigma Tau Foundation based in Rome. Luca Ronconi, one of Italy’s most famous theatre directors, had just taken over as creative director at the Teatro Piccolo in Milan, and was anxious to explore the use of scientific ideas in the theatre in new ways. The Sigma Tau Foundation was keen to find new ways of presenting science to the public.

The invitation was simply to write a play about science. Once I realised Donghi wasn’t joking, I began to wonder what science I could possibly write about for the stage? I would have to write in English – the results would be translated into Italian and performed by Italians for Italians, so it was no place for an English comedy of manners. And although there were several successful modern plays that seemed to be about science – Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen and Berthold Brecht’s Galileo, for example – that was not really the case: scientific ideas played no essential role. They were compelling dramas that fed on the lives of scientists, and I wanted to do something other than create a human drama or a didactic piece where science was hidden within fiction. After all, others were already filling that niche.

And so I decided upon infinity. While most attempts to popularise scientific ideas in the Anglo-Saxon tradition do so by means of simple explanation liberally mixed with apposite analogy, the strategy for Infinities was quite different. By immersing the audience in other realities, where the counter-intuitive features of the infinite loomed as large as life, I imagined that one could have a hope of penetrating its paradoxes. Storytelling seemed to offer a fruitful path through the labyrinth of the infinite.

Ronconi and I spent two years planning a series of extraordinary but stand-alone scenes. We were fortunate in being able to exploit the huge space available to the Teatro Piccolo and the scenes were written with the novel environments in mind. We created a play in five separate scenarios, each exploring a different aspect of infinity. The scenarios are set on five separate performance stages; Ronconi has managed to make each setting spectacular and unique. Our meetings with Donghi gave me the opportunity to explain the background to the paradoxes we would explore, and we found ourselves able to collaborate easily: our imaginations were unexpectedly similar about many things, and in the end we used only a fraction of the ideas for sets that we came up with.

The audience is admitted to the first scene in groups of about 70 every 20 minutes. 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. During the Milan season this year it was necessary to perform 10 complete performances of the five scenarios each evening to try to meet the huge demand for tickets, which sold out more than 2 months before the play opened.

The first scenario that greets the audience is the towering set and vast expanse of the Hotel Infinity. Even when it is full, it still has room for infinitely more guests, creating innumerable problems for everyone. The second scenario moves to the smaller, more intimate space of that rest home for those doomed to live forever. The third is a strange universe where nothing is original: in an infinite universe everything that can happen, will happen, infinitely many times. No words are spoken for the first time; no idea is new; there is no originality and no motivation to create. There can be no copyright. It is set in a spectacular labyrinth of rows and columns surrounded by mirrors, where identical actors speak the same words and make identical movements. Actors appear unexpectedly from all around as the audience moves through the matrix of mysterious cupboards.

After that, the audience meet Georg Cantor, the German mathematician 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 the strangeness of the different varieties of infinity that Galileo first sensed, and the hostility he faced from other mathematicians who wanted these dangerous concepts kept out of their subject. Finally, the audience are confronted with a disturbing question: where did the play they have been watching come from? This last scenario tackles the paradoxes of time travel: could I have been handed the script for Infinities by someone who saw it today and travelled to the past to pass it to me?

In this scene, the actors march in circles with everyone behind and in front of everyone else, demonstrating how, although time has no end, it remains finite. We see why you cannot change the past, merely participate in it, and witness a self-consistent sequence of events in circular time. The audience is given the illusion of looking out through windows into the daylight, but the windows spring open to welcome the tourists from the future. This scene is typical of the demands Infinities makes on its producers: the production in Milan was large, involving a cast of 15 professional actors and about 50 drama students. Ronconi tells me that the actors faced the biggest challenge – at least one found the mixture of a new way of staging and the unusual subject matter too much, and pulled out at an early stage in the production.

Although tickets give the time for the start of the cycle you will see, you can see the scenes in any order. And it is not a passive experience – the divide between actors and audience dissolves in new ways. Indeed, the actors add their own sense of the infinite to the play: they permute around the scenarios, resulting in different actors introducing small changes to the action every time a scenario is performed. So, in theory, you could see the play again and again, and you would never actually watch exactly the same play twice.