Individuality questioned in A Number

Individuality questioned in A Number

19 October 2011

Father and son duo Timothy and Samuel West star in A

 Number at The Fugard Studio theatre. Photo: Jesse Kramer

‘We are all individuals,’ is the famous line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian that, old and oft-repeated as it is, still produces a snigger or wry smile at its truism.
For while we are each one of us unique, we are also more alike than we may wish to admit. We prize our individuality, yet seek to fit within the bounds of what might be considered normal, even the eccentric has been drawn into realm of acceptable exceptions to the rule.
Yet what happens when this idea of our individuality is challenged? What would we do if we discovered there was not one, but 20 or more of us?
This is the question playwright Caryl Churchill examins in her play A Number, which opened at The Fugard Theatre on October 4. Written in 2002 when cloning was a hot topic of debate – Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned in 2005 – it is written for two actors, and has four characters.
Bernard (B2) lives with his father, Salter, but then discovers the existence of a clone (B1). The question of who is the original is the main dramatic question, and questions escalate when a third clone, Michael Black, appears. In fact, B2 hears there may be 20 or more clones.
What is special about the run at The Fugard’s Studio stage is that the two actors are father and son team Timothy and Samuel West, who had no fewer than seven five-star reviews during their recent run in London’s West End.
WCN was able to pull them out of rehearsals before the opening to chat about the play.
Timothy, who turns 77 later this month, looks every bit the elderly Englishman dressed in hues in brown and tan, while his son Samuel, 45, in jeans and a grey hoodie, apologises for not having shoes on.
It is very soon apparent that there is no issue of Sam – as Timothy calls him – living in his father’s shadow.
In fact Tim – as Sam calls him – tells how when director Richard Eyre offered him the part of elderly Maurice in the film Iris, Richard’s condition was that Sam accepted the part of the younger Maurice in the film.
Timothy’s own father, Lockwood West, was an actor and his wife and Samuel’s mother Prunella Scales is also an actor. “It’s the family business,” says Sam.
Conversation quickly turns to the philosophical questions raised by A Number with Sam noting that the ethics of cloning seem to hold little interest for “Caryl” (Churchill).
“A Number is much more about the human interest, which is what Caryl is all about,” says Tim, as Sam adds that the play provides a situation – cloning has happened, “and these are the results”.
Sam mentions that when they did their first run at The Crucible in Sheffield in 2007, Dolly had been cloned two years prior and cloning was a “hot topic”.
“But we’ve moved away from that, the issue now is more about genetic predetermination. There’s talk of insurance companies doing genetic profiling and refusing to provide life or health insurance cover because your genetic make-up shows you’re prone to cancer, for instance. These are the sort of things that the play fights against, it’s a celebration of individualism.”
Tim notes that “conflict arises when people think they don’t own their individuality” and, possibly drawing on the wisdom of age, reflects that, ironically, “the happier people don’t worry about the fact that they’re not the only one, that they don’t stand out from the crowd.”
Talk of individuality leads to speculation on the society we live in.
“It’s an extraordinary function of global capitalism that we don’t have much of a freedom of choice yet we live in a culture where we’re being sold individuality all the time, as tiny little choices from mass produced items, like you can have extra cheese on your McDonalds,” says Sam, or people defining their personality by the things they own.
Caryl throws a curve ball in that while B1 and B2 react very badly to the discovery that they’re not the only ones – as might be expected – the third clone, Michael Black, who is married with children and works as a maths teacher, is unperturbed by the discovery.
Tim and Sam believe the message here is that the greater the number of loving relationships in a person’s life, the happier they are bound to be.
“It is clear that Michael has had a balanced upbringing, he talks simply and beautifully about love and is at the centre of a large number of loving bonds. B1 on the other hand, does not even have a dog to love him, there’s nobody in his life, no bonds. Caryl believes in the strength of these bonds very much,” says Sam.
It’s also clear that Sam must have had a balanced upbringing to be able to act with his father in a play which raises so many questions of identity and upbringing.
“You have to well-adjusted off stage in order to beat the shit out of each other on stage,” says Sam. — Steve Kretzmann
A Number plays at The Fugard Theatre Studio until October 29

Individuality questioned in A Number

Individuality questioned in A Number

19 October 2011

Father and son duo Timothy and Samuel West star in A Number at The Fugard Studio theatre. Photo: Jesse Kramer

‘We are all individuals,’ is the famous line from Monty Python’s Life of Brian that, old and oft-repeated as it is, still produces a snigger or wry smile at its truism.
For while we are each one of us unique, we are also more alike than we may wish to admit. We prize our individuality, yet seek to fit within the bounds of what might be considered normal, even the eccentric has been drawn into realm of acceptable exceptions to the rule.
Yet what happens when this idea of our individuality is challenged? What would we do if we discovered there was not one, but 20 or more of us?
This is the question playwright Caryl Churchill examins in her play A Number, which opened at The Fugard Theatre on October 4. Written in 2002 when cloning was a hot topic of debate – Dolly the sheep was successfully cloned in 2005 – it is written for two actors, and has four characters.
Bernard (B2) lives with his father, Salter, but then discovers the existence of a clone (B1). The question of who is the original is the main dramatic question, and questions escalate when a third clone, Michael Black, appears. In fact, B2 hears there may be 20 or more clones.
What is special about the run at The Fugard’s Studio stage is that the two actors are father and son team Timothy and Samuel West, who had no fewer than seven five-star reviews during their recent run in London’s West End.
WCN was able to pull them out of rehearsals before the opening to chat about the play.
Timothy, who turns 77 later this month, looks every bit the elderly Englishman dressed in hues in brown and tan, while his son Samuel, 45, in jeans and a grey hoodie, apologises for not having shoes on.
It is very soon apparent that there is no issue of Sam – as Timothy calls him – living in his father’s shadow.
In fact Tim – as Sam calls him – tells how when director Richard Eyre offered him the part of elderly Maurice in the film Iris, Richard’s condition was that Sam accepted the part of the younger Maurice in the film.
Timothy’s own father, Lockwood West, was an actor and his wife and Samuel’s mother Prunella Scales is also an actor. “It’s the family business,” says Sam.
Conversation quickly turns to the philosophical questions raised by A Number with Sam noting that the ethics of cloning seem to hold little interest for “Caryl” (Churchill).
“A Number is much more about the human interest, which is what Caryl is all about,” says Tim, as Sam adds that the play provides a situation – cloning has happened, “and these are the results”.
Sam mentions that when they did their first run at The Crucible in Sheffield in 2007, Dolly had been cloned two years prior and cloning was a “hot topic”.
“But we’ve moved away from that, the issue now is more about genetic predetermination. There’s talk of insurance companies doing genetic profiling and refusing to provide life or health insurance cover because your genetic make-up shows you’re prone to cancer, for instance. These are the sort of things that the play fights against, it’s a celebration of individualism.”
Tim notes that “conflict arises when people think they don’t own their individuality” and, possibly drawing on the wisdom of age, reflects that, ironically, “the happier people don’t worry about the fact that they’re not the only one, that they don’t stand out from the crowd.”
Talk of individuality leads to speculation on the society we live in.
“It’s an extraordinary function of global capitalism that we don’t have much of a freedom of choice yet we live in a culture where we’re being sold individuality all the time, as tiny little choices from mass produced items, like you can have extra cheese on your McDonalds,” says Sam, or people defining their personality by the things they own.
Caryl throws a curve ball in that while B1 and B2 react very badly to the discovery that they’re not the only ones – as might be expected – the third clone, Michael Black, who is married with children and works as a maths teacher, is unperturbed by the discovery.
Tim and Sam believe the message here is that the greater the number of loving relationships in a person’s life, the happier they are bound to be.
“It is clear that Michael has had a balanced upbringing, he talks simply and beautifully about love and is at the centre of a large number of loving bonds. B1 on the other hand, does not even have a dog to love him, there’s nobody in his life, no bonds. Caryl believes in the strength of these bonds very much,” says Sam.
It’s also clear that Sam must have had a balanced upbringing to be able to act with his father in a play which raises so many questions of identity and upbringing.
“You have to well-adjusted off stage in order to beat the shit out of each other on stage,” says Sam. — Steve Kretzmann
A Number plays at The Fugard Theatre Studio until October 29

A Number is great theatre that exhilarates and provokes

A Number is great theatre that exhilarates and provokes

Marianne Thamm | 16 October, 2011 02:16



Slater (Timothy West) and his son,
Bernard 2 (Samuel West) Picture: JESSE KRAMER



 

Dolly the sheep inspires play, writes Marianne Thamm

CAPE TOWN

THEATRE

A NUMBER

Fugard Theatre, 021 461 4554, until October 29

IMAGINE someone walks into a room full of people, tosses in a grand idea and walks out again. That's more or less what British playwright Caryl Churchill accomplishes with A Number, an exhilarating 50-minute philosophical and dramatic riff that provokes a range of questions and thoughts.
Churchill, regarded as one of the most significant contemporary British dramatists, wrote A Number in 2002 shortly after scientists had cloned the world's first sheep, Dolly.
Here she uses cloning as a prompt for the much larger concepts the play attempts to explore but deliberately never quite resolves. The mystery of it all - like the double helix of a strand of DNA - is what slowly and unwittingly reels the audience in. This is a play not only about secrets, lies and betrayal but also the essence of individual identity.
It takes place on a starkly lit stage with one armchair. Above, a slab of test tubes hovers like a futuristic chandelier. Here we find an obviously uneasy and evasive older man, Slater (Timothy West), being confronted by his son, Bernard 2 (Samuel West).
Bernard 2 is distressed at having learned that he is a clone, a copy of a son Slater had five years before his birth.
But there's more. Bernard 2 has discovered that the scientist who "made" him has also created at least 20 other copies. The truth unlocks for him an existential crisis of identity.
The play unfolds in five interlocking scenes in which we later meet the angry and menacing "original" Bernard 1 (also played by Samuel West), whom Slater abandoned after the death of his mother.
Without giving away too much, Bernard 1 exacts a terrible revenge for his father's attempts at "recreating" him.
Towards the end Slater meets a second clone, Michael Black, for the first time. Black is the same age as Bernard 2 but much less tortured about his origins. In fact he finds it "delightful" that he is a clone.
Inside of this triangle Churchill bounces ideas of nature versus nurture and what it might be that makes us authentic and unique. But it is also what is not in the text that resonates intellectually long afterwards.
For example Churchill's deliberate exclusion of the female or the maternal, the narcissism of procreation, the role of violence in male identity and the chauvinism of science.
This revival of the London production features Timothy and Samuel West, a father and son acting duo. It is the younger West who has to work harder here in rendering each of the characters differently. A change of clothing, gait, accent and nuance is all that is required as West fully inhabits each one.
The older West is a beautifully manipulative and emotionally withholding patriarch caught in a web of lies, recriminations and regrets.
Churchill's text gives no stage or set directions and director Jonathan Munby steers a steady course between the playwright's porous dialogue and the unusual unfolding of the story.
A Number is great theatre for those who enjoy being intellectually cajoled and provoked. And like life itself, there are no neat resolutions.

A Number

A Number

Photo: Jesee Kramer

Interview with director Jonathan Munby and actors Timothy West and Samuel West for Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town. This article originally ran in the Mail & Guardian of 7 October 2011.

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.

October 7, 2011

http://realreview.co.za/

Music stirs chambers of the heart

Music stirs chambers of the heart

November 16, 2010

"There was room for something much more in-depth and psychological" . . .
Samuel West plays the (supposed) lover to a murdered woman. Photo: Dean Sewell

British actor Samuel West is combining his two great loves, writes Catherine Keenan.

When Samuel West was 17, he fancied a cellist at his school who went off to the International Musicians Seminar in Prussia Cove, Cornwall. She wrote urging him to come also. ''As a cellist?'' he asked hopefully (he dabbled then, as now). She said, ''No, but you could work in the kitchens. You could do the washing up.'' He did.
He was so taken with the place, he's been back about 50 times in the past 25-odd years, washing dishes for five or six weeks a year. ''I stage manage the concerts as well, but it's mostly washing up,'' he says, in his richly resonant voice, emanating from the face of a boy scout.

It's an odd thing for one of Britain's more respected actors to do. He's played Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed opera for English National Opera, appeared in films including Howards End and Notting Hill, and he recently earned rave reviews - and a Laurence Olivier Award nomination - for his role in Enron in the West End. But the experience confirmed West's love of chamber music. Which, it turns out, has been great news for the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
West and Michael Stevens, the ACO's artistic administrator, became friends when they toured the Middle East together with the Choir of London. Stevens wanted to do something with West in Australia - while West may not have made it as a cellist, that velvety voice makes him a sought-after narrator. He's worked with many of Britain's orchestras on works that include Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale, Saint-Saens's Carnival of the Animals and William Walton's Facade.
He and Stevens came up with the idea of linking the three great works of art called the Kreutzer Sonata: Beethoven's original work; Tolstoy's novella about a man who murders his wife for her supposed infidelity, in which Beethoven's sonata (perhaps) inflames passions; and Janacek's Quartet No. 1, which West and Stevens agreed was not, as is sometimes thought, a programmatic description of the Tolstoy.
Tolstoy's story is told from the point of view of the jealous man, the murderer, whereas Janacek's sympathies lay more with the silent, murdered woman. ''There was room for something much more in-depth and psychological,'' says West. ''And then it was over to Laura to see how she could make it work.''
Laura is Laura Wade, 33, West's partner and a rising playwright. (Her first two plays earned her a Critics' Circle Theatre Award for most promising playwright). Like Janacek, she found her imagination fired by the voices you don't hear in Tolstoy, and she came up with a crisp, ingenious way of linking these different pieces. Australian actress Robin McLeavy plays the wife, and West plays not her jealous husband but her (supposed) lover.
They reprise two different versions of their relationship, one punctuating the ACO's performance of the Beethoven; the other threaded through, and shedding new light on, the Janacek.
West, 44, is only in Australia briefly, having come straight from performing Caryl Churchill's A Number in the West End with his father, Timothy West (his mother is Prunella Scales, aka Mrs Basil Fawlty). He listens to ''lots of techno'', classical jazz and some opera, but his great love is chamber music, particularly ''the big central European composers''.
''This is going to sound really wanky, forgive me,'' he says, trying to explain. He remembers working on Cosi Fan Tutte, for the English National Opera, when it was, of course, a great privilege to hear Mozart every morning. ''But you sort of have to put yourself in the right mood to listen to Mozart. What I find with Janacek or Schoenberg or Bartok is that they don't care what mood you're in, they will put you in their mood. They will bring you round to their way of thinking and I find that incredibly powerful and slightly wordless,'' he says.
The power of music to link directly with the heart is discussed in a short passage in the Tolstoy, from which its title comes. It also lies at the heart of Kreutzer vs Kreutzer, a labile and contradictory thing, says West. ''Music can soothe the savage breast, but also it's the food of love, play on.'' Sometimes both at once.
Kreutzer vs Kreutzer is at the City Recital Hall, Angel Place, on Saturday, next Tuesday and Wednesday and at the Opera House on Sunday.


Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/music/music-stirs-chambers-of-the-heart-20101115-17uaq.html#ixzz1qKEl02zF

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.

Wests’ chemistry adds life to tale of father and his cloned sons in A Number

A Number

Description: Carol Churchill's award-winning drama about human cloning, starring father-and-son team Timothy and Samuel West. Directed by Jonathan Munby

Wests’ chemistry adds life to tale of father and his cloned sons in A Number

Caryl Churchill’s prickly, rewarding play about a father, his son and the son’s several cloned copies was premiered at the Royal Court eight years ago, starring Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig. Here, in a fine revival of a production previously seen in Sheffield, the roles belong to real-life father and son Timothy and Samuel West, and the chemistry between them is palpable.

Natural chemistry: real-life father and son Timothy and Samuel West

The play’s first words are “a number”. They’re addressed to Salter (Timothy West), who many years ago had his son cloned in the aftermath of a shocking bereavement. The line is spoken by Salter’s grown-up son Bernard; we soon gather he’s commenting on the many genetically identical versions of himself in existence.
Bernard realises that instead of being truly individual he is part of a kind of tribe. As he and two of Salter’s other sons (all played by Samuel West) come calling, Churchill reflects on the question of what happens to personal identity in a society where the idea of uniqueness unravels.
Her writing evokes the faltering, even inarticulate quality of Salter’s confrontations with his sons. They engage in a morbid dance, manoeuvring around each other and exchanging reflections on guilt, authenticity and duty.
Theirs is a world in which everything has been fragmented, and the gap between them is both moral and generational.
Samuel West manages in his three different guises to be pained, sardonic, resentful, brutish and suave. There’s a meaty rawness throughout.
Timothy West gives a performance richly furbished with little tics and postural shifts that betray the intimate mechanics of self-justification.
The refractory nature of their conversations is conveyed nicely by director Jonathan Munby. There are some unsettling lighting effects by Oliver Fenwick, while the defining feature of Paul Wills’s design is a huge rack of test tubes suspended above the actors: a clever visual joke about the way our scientific apparatus is well ahead of our ability to man-age the psychological consequences of Brave New World technology.
Enigmatic, mournful and under-stated, A Number is a subtly compelling meditation on individuality. As I heard one audience member mutter, it’s a play for the head rather than the heart. Clinical in its precision, at 50 minutes it is hardly a full evening’s entertainment, but it will have audiences wrangling at length over the uncomfortable questions it invites.

A Number, Menier Chocolate factory, review

Timothy West and Samuel West play a father and his sons in Caryl Churchill's play that is as as emotionally upsetting as it is intellectually and morally profound. Rating: * * * *

Tim West and Samuel West performing in A Number

 at the Menier Chocolate Factory Photo: Alastair Muir

 

By Charles Spencer

4:14PM BST 05 Oct 2010

Caryl Churchill’s play lasts less than an hour but packs in more emotion, ideas, and disconcerting strangeness, than many dramatists manage in half a dozen dramas.

First staged at the Royal Court in 2002, A Number now receives a superb revival at the Menier Chocolate Factory that adds a further twist. This is a play about a father and his sons and they are played here by Timothy West and his own son, Samuel.

In the first scene we meet Bernard (35) who has always believed he is a much loved only child. However he has just discovered he has as many as twenty cloned brothers. Still worse, he may not even be the original from whom all the others were copied. He goes to his father, upset and confused, and his father insists that Bernard is his original, beloved son and the others were created without his knowledge or permission by the doctor involved. He even envisages a lucrative legal action that could make them as much as £5 million.

But the father, Salter, isn’t telling the truth. In the next scene he is confronted by another Bernard (40) five years older than the one we met before, and very different in character. The younger Bernard was emotional, needy, loving. The older one is a vicious, possibly psychopathic thug. But then it transpires that his father treated him terribly in his childhood, and had him placed in care at the age of four, cloning a new version, whom he looked after much better. At the end we also meet a third of his many cloned sons.

Out of a sci-fi scenario which could one day become a real-life possibility, Churchill creates a play that is as emotionally upsetting as it is intellectually and morally profound. But A Number, despite its darkness and echoes of Cain and Abel, is also an unexpectedly optimistic work.

Tackling the nature-versus-nurture debate head-on, the dramatist concludes that human beings aren’t just the sum of their genetic parts, and that we aren’t preordained to assume a particular personality and mode of behaviour.
Churchill’s spare, confrontational dialogue has a similar power and precision to Pinter at his best, and there isn’t an ounce of surplus fat on the piece. Timothy West plays the father with a mixture of furtive unease, gnawing guilt and a deeply moving vulnerability, both physical and emotional. Meanwhile Samuel West differentiates the three sons with high-definition panache. This is a play, and a production, worth 50 minutes of anyone’s time.

Review: A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory

Monday, 4 October 2010

Review: A Number, Menier Chocolate Factory

“You think I wouldn't know if I was your father?"

This production of Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Menier Chocolate Factory is a revival of the 2006 production in Sheffield which starred real-life father and son, Timothy West and Samuel West who reappear here with the same director in Jonathan Munby. In order to retain the integrity of the show, the Menier has been reconfigured into the round for the first time ever, something which works so well here, I hope they think about doing it again.

Coming in at 50 minutes without a break, it rips through its central debate of nature versus nurture with a side order of the ethics of cloning as it poses questions about the nature of identity. Salter is a man who, for initially unknown reasons, had his four year old son Bernard cloned. Years later, Bernard discovers that he has a cloned brother and confronts his father, but in doing so discovers that there’s ‘a number’ of the clones and thus the debate begins.

Timothy West is good as the man clinging on to the self-justification of his questionable decision, full of nervous tics but it is Samuel West who is excellent as the three sons, making the distinctions between them all crystal clear and demonstrating exactly where Churchill lies on the issue of whether people with the same genetic identity can have separate identities.

I liked Paul Wills’ starkly utilitarian design, especially the ceiling of test tubes but as with Oliver Fenwick’s lighting (I loved the scanner effect), less is more as the focus is solely on the acting. And whilst it is indeed impeccably acted, I felt there was something ultimately lacking here, a sense of emotion to go with the science. The programme features an interesting interview with the Wests and Munby which really enthused me about the potential of this show, but I must admit to not seeing much of what they talked about. So a most cerebral experience but sadly unsatisfying despite the pleasure in watching father and son revelling in each other’s talent.

Running time: 50 minutes

Programme cost: £2

Booking until 5th November

Wests do A Number for Menier autumn

Wests do A Number for Menier autumn

Reporter: Matthew Amer, first published Wed 04 Aug 2010 16:09

Father and son Timothy and Samuel West will star in Caryl Churchill’s A Number at the Menier Chocolate Factory this autumn, returning to roles they previous played in Sheffield four years ago.

The drama, directed by Jonathan Munby, is part of an autumn season that also includes Ken Hill’s music hall caper The Invisible Man and the European premiere of US hit Accomplice.

Churchill’s A Number, a familial drama exploring cloning, identity and the nature versus nurture debate, marks Samuel West’s first return to the Menier Chocolate Factory since he directed Dealer’s Choice in 2007. More recently the former Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres has been seen playing Jeffrey Skilling in the hugely successful Enron. He is joined by his father Timothy, whose career has seen him perform across London with companies including the Royal Shakespeare Company, National Theatre, English Touring Theatre and Royal Court.

A Number runs from 29 September to 5 November. It is followed by The Invisible Man (12 November to 13 February), which is directed by former Open Air Theatre Artistic Director Ian Talbot.

Ken Hills’s adaptation of HG Wells’s classic novel sees the hideous happenings that shook the bucolic village of Iping when the sinister Griffin arrived wrapped in bandages and with a distinctly unsociable manner, told as a music hall romp with plenty of tongue-in-cheek humour.

Accomplice, which runs from 4 September, is part game, part theatre and part tour. Set on the streets of SE1, it sends audiences on a walking discovery of theatre and mystery. Armed with basic information and aided by clues and cast members along the way, each group of audience members must piece together the meticulously crafted plot.

Accomplice is based on a successful American idea, which debuted in New York in 2005 and proved so popular that two further versions were created, 2007’s New York-based Accomplice: The Village and 2009’s LA offering Accomplice: Hollywood.

The Menier Chocolate Factory has fast become one of London’s most influential fringe theatres, transferring productions including Sunday In The Park With George, La Cage Aux Folles and A Little Night Music to both the West End and Broadway with award-winning success. It is currently represented in the West End by hit musical Sweet Charity and the Willy Russell double bill of Educating Rita and Shirley Valentine, which both started at the Menier. At its home venue it is currently staging a Trevor Nunn-directed revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects Of Love, which plays until 11 September.

MA

Uneasy alliances in new Caryl Churchill play

Uneasy alliances in new Caryl Churchill play

by Michael Sommers/Star-Ledger Staff

Sunday March 16, 2008, 8:00 PM

Samuel West, left, and Scott Cohen star in "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" at the Public Theater.



Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? Where: Public Theater, 425 Lafayette St., New York. When: Through April 6. 7 p.m. Tuesdays; 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays; 3 and 7 p.m. Sundays. How much: $50. Call (212) 967-7555 or visit publictheater.org.
NEW YORK -- Obviously mutually attracted, two good-looking men lean toward each other on a couch and start talking really dirty -- about military campaigns, covert operations, torture, trade agreements and the control of outer space, among other issues.

Representing the relationship between the United States and Great Britain in recent years, these figures share a rocky romance in Caryl Churchill's short, sharp, satirical allegory "Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?"
Running merely 45 minutes in length -- but running mighty deep in sardonic contents -- the play opened tonight at the Public Theater.

The genius British author of many terrific plays, ranging from the sexy "Cloud Nine" to the scary "The Skriker," Churchill never ceases to surprise viewers with the subjects she chooses to dramatize and the different styles she employs.

Abstract in approach yet meaningful in substance, her latest work is no exception.

"Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?" consists of a swift series of eight short scenes. Each scene is devoted to a particular topic relating to U.S.-U.K. global policies. Each is crafted in brief, elliptical exchanges between the characters.

Sam (Scott Cohen) is the assured, reckless guy in jeans. Guy (Samuel West) is a tad more refined in manner, wearing a sports coat and flannels. The couch they share floats somewhere in blackness and is presented as a living picture within a gilt frame of light bulbs.

Based on their past together, the two appear intimate from the get-go as they speak of manipulating other nations covertly or through economic or military means. But eventually their dangerous liaison goes terribly wrong.

"No no no the towers," cries Sam. "Wow," exclaims Guy.

"Evil," declares Sam. "OK?" ponders Guy.

"Hate me because I'm so good," states Sam. "All of these terrorists suddenly," wonders Guy.

"Make everyone love me because it's only the evildoers who hate me," demands Sam.

Talk of torture and troubles ensues. Concluding in a litany of natural disasters, the former allies are depicted at last by Churchill as estranged and bitter, yet still hopelessly dependent on each other.

The points Churchill makes surely will satisfy many liberal-minded viewers willing to go along with the playwright's symbolic representation of these matters.

The production is directed by James Macdonald, who staged the play's world premiere at the Royal Court Theatre in London (and will also direct Manhattan Theatre Club's Broadway revival of Churchill's "Top Girls" next month). In league with his first-rate actors and designers, Macdonald offers a brisk and assured presentation of this polemic comedy.
Michael Sommers may be reached at msommers@starledger.com or (212) 790-4434.

NJ.com