Featuring a literary evening of 'real-world' mathematics scenarios with Billy Mullaney
June 14, 2026, doors at 8pm
Torpedo Theater, Amsterdam
Playbill welcomes Billy Mullaney for a spoken-word performance that draws from an unexpected source: the geometry textbook from which he used to teach. Taking the language of mathematical problems as both script and score, Mullaney transforms a pedagogical tool into a theatrical event. Unfolding across a succession of exercises and chapters, the performance traces the peculiar scenarios through which geometry attempts to model the world.
Delivered in a deadpan style, GEOMETRY treats the language governing quadrilaterals, transversals and combinatorics as a form of found poetry. Instructions, calculations and hypothetical situations accumulate into a strange portrait of reality, one in which people continually have absurd problems that need solving, their lives governed by the promise that every one of these problems has a solution and every solution can be demonstrated. As the exercises unfold, the work exposes the gap between mathematical problem-solving and the more unruly conditions of lived experience, asking what it means to seek congruence between abstract systems and the world they claim to describe.
Based in Amsterdam, within his larger practice Billy Mullaney works across theatre, choreography and performance art. His work explores how performances shape the way we see, think and pay attention. Often drawing on familiar formats—including quantum physics lectures, promotional trailers, DIY craft workshops and tarot card readings—he subtly deviates from their rules and standards, inviting audiences to experience them in new ways. Through these interventions, his performances examine how systems of knowledge, work and attention affect the body, revealing the pressures and absurdities of contemporary life. For ACT XVII Torpedo Theater becomes a classroom-cum-comedy club, where unexpected humour is found in Mullaney’s interrogation into the literary status of the mathematics problem itself.
PROGRAMME
8pm
Introduction to Billy Mullaney
8.10pm
Performance by Billy Mullaney
Approximately 75mins
9.30pm—Drinks
