A Number – review

Menier Chocolate Factory, London

• guardian.co.uk, Thursday 7 October 2010 15.18 BST



Timothy West and Samuel West in A Number. Photograph: Tristram Kenton



 

Caryl Churchill's astonishing play raises many issues: the meaning of identity, the conflict between nature and nurture, the ethics of cloning. But, by casting Timothy and Samuel West opposite each other, as it did at the Sheffield Crucible in 2006, Jonathan Munby's production focuses on the fraught intimacy of father-son relationships.

In five cryptically engrossing scenes, Churchill shows a troubled patriarch, Salter, confront three of his supposed offspring. Bernard One, the psychologically maimed product of a single-parent upbringing, is the authentic original. From the cells of this child, a doctor has created the more pacific Bernard Two, and gone on to clone another 20 sons, one of whom Salter apprehensively meets. But even this is to simplify a non-linear work in which big ideas are explored through a series of dynamic encounters.
Churchill asks what the source is of the self, and suggests it has more to do with environment than genetics. The real drama, however, resides in the way ingrained lies are gradually exposed, and in the father's guilt: he tells his original son, whom he put into care, he was "this disgusting thing", yet so perfect he wanted him artificially reproduced.
Timothy West presents us with a figure plagued by doubt, insecurity and fear. Samuel West crisply differentiates the three "sons", suggesting variations on Lenny, Joey and Teddy in Pinter's The Homecoming. This is superb acting from West pere et fils.