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Photo: Jesee Kramer |
A Number at the Fugard Theatre
Brent Meersman talks to director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy and Samuel West.
It is increasingly self-evident that the Earth has entered the epoch of the anthropocene, an age in which the impact of a single species, our own, is transforming the planet. Our enormous impact ranges from climate change to the remodelling of vast areas of the surface of the Earth. Today, we talk not only of the threat of global warming, but hubristically of climate engineering.
As population grows exponentially and with it mankind’s knowledge and understanding of the sciences, humans are rapidly developing the ability to alter, manipulate and create life. This biological revolution together with nanotechnology will vastly dwarf the industrial revolution that created the modern world.
Dolly the Sheep was cloned 15 years ago. The human genome has since been sequenced. Chimeras (such as a geep –a fusion of sheep and goat) and artificial life with synthetic DNA have been engineered. Scientists even modified a human embryo to fluoresce in the dark. It was destroyed. Had it lived that person would have been luminous.
Ever since the creation of the first atomic bomb more than half a century ago, man’s philosophical discourse, our ethical and moral understanding, and with it the legal and emotional implications the new sciences have for us as individuals, has been lagging far behind. We barely keep pace with the sociological implications of such new communication tools as Facebook and Twitter.
These psychological consequences for humanity in this brave new world are the subject of A Number by renowned British playwright Caryl Churchill. Written in 2002, it deals with a father (Salter) and his three sons, Bernard (B1), Bernard (B2) and Michael Black, two of whom are clones.
The play has its South African premier at the Fugard Theatre’s studio space in Cape Town with a highly acclaimed UK production.
“The space was once a church, and here they are doing a play about man who has played god,” says director Jonathan Munby.
Taking the roles of the father and sons are real life father and son Timothy and Samuel West. Both actors are well known to local audiences from their too-numerous-to-list film and television performances. For his sins, Timothy West played PW Botha in Endgame (2009).
Samuel West ventures that “with the death of Harold Pinter” Churchill is arguably the UK’s greatest dramatist. “She’s an unassuming goddess of theatre . . . I think it is [because of] her incredible use of form as well as content. She is very easily bored by the plays that she has already done . . . When she has a great success with something she is never tempted to go back to it. This play in particular [A Number] gets the marriage of form and content particularly well because of it casting three people in one.”
Timothy West adds she is “very elusive to pin down as a stylist . . . Her extraordinary use of dramatic text in a very unfamiliar way, yet it has a searing realism about it. It is frightfully difficult to learn.” He laughs. “She’s declared war on punctuation.”
“There is nobody like her [presently],” adds Munby, “a writer who experiments and is brave enough to reinvent themselves every time.”
Having a real life father and son “opens up the humanity of the play” according to Munby.
“It means we can get to the truth of what this relationship is immediately. . . it gets to the heart of it. When we started rehearsals, it was like starting in week five rather than week one.”
“I do think what it would be like to do this play with someone who wasn’t your dad,” muses Samuel West. “I’ve spent 45 years being his son and if it wasn’t [so] I’d have five weeks of rehearsal to pretend to be.”
The Wests laugh. “It certainly hasn’t drawn us apart!”
Munby adds: “The audience has a thrilling relationship with it as a piece of theatre. Of course they’re inside the drama and the characters but they’re engaging on another level with a real life father and son and seeing the similarities between them, not just physical. There’s that dialogue going on as well. . . The resonance of when Tim’s character says, ‘and I loved you’ − the resonance hits ten times deeper than if it were just two actors.”
“You get a nice laugh,” says Samuel West, “when he [Salter] says ‘just wait because I’m your father’, and another one when I say ‘you know that’”.
Reviving the play from their first run with it in 2006 has also brought new insights. And touring to South Africa means “the piece will change inevitably because there is a different audience,” says Munby. “The debate about identity in South Africa is going to be a completely different conversation from the one we had in London.”
Samuel West adds: “As you get further away from the idea of cloning [which is not particularly topical in South Africa], the play becomes less of a hot topic; cloning is the cause of the play but it is less interested in the science as a subject of drama”.
Munby says: “Churchill is more interested in the humanity and the relationships than the ethics of the sciences. She presents much more a debate about nature and nurture, about what makes us us. . . . I don’t think she is interested in the ethics of is cloning right or wrong.”
Timothy West comments that “there is officially never been an example of human cloning – that we know of – though we suspect there might be, but we know it is theoretically possible.”
A Number runs at the Fugard Theatre until October 29.
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