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.

Cloning: it’s an identity crisis

October 11 2011 at 09:05am
By Theresa Smith

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A NUMBER

DIRECTOR: Jonathan Munby

CAST: Timothy West and Samuel West

VENUE: The Fugard Theatre

UNTIL: October 29

RATING: ***

The looped sound of a crying child greets you upon entering the Sigrid Rausing room at The Fugard Theatre, creating a creepy atmosphere, helped along by eerily-lit stalactite test tubes.

The very simple stage contains only a chair and a side table and the staging has been done in such a way that you feel almost voyeu-ristic. The seating rakes up two sides of the room, and you are constantly watching the charac-ters’ profiles, peeking into their lives, as the younger ones confront the older man.

Bernard (Samuel West) challenges his father, Salter (Timothy West), about apparently having been cloned, and finds out that it is true and he doesn’t really know his father after all.

When Bernard finds out he was cloned he starts to question his identity, uncovering a lifetime of family secrets. Does the existence of a clone damage his uniqueness, he asks his father.

While the ethics of cloning was the provocative topic when this play was first staged in 2002, it seems to have faded into the background, foregrounding the issue of how identity is created.

Turns out Salter had his son cloned so that he could start over again with a new son and get it right, but as Bernard puts it – he can’t give his dad credit for one thing if he can’t blame him for the other.

West sr creates a dignified character who is more indignant that the cloning doctor made a number of copies than that the secret’s out. While he stands by his actions, Salter becomes progres-sively plagued by doubt, coming across as increasingly vulnerable.

West jr gives us three different sons: the first, Bernard, is scared by the idea of losing himself in the morass of too many Mes; there’s an older Bernard who is much more confrontational, angry and physical; and a Michael who seems to be the most well-adjusted with his own family.

West uses more than just clothes to create three characters with different attitudes, accents and personalities.

For all the atmospheric eeriness created with the lights, set and sound design, it’s surprisingly non-weird because it’s a story about fathers and sons. For all the clever lines about individuality and responsibility, the line that stands out is from the first Bernard: “When you’re small your father isn’t old or young, he’s just a dark presence.”

The ploy of using a real-life father and son team brings the intimacy of that relationship into sharp relief. Because they know each other so well, the jagged dialogue is believable; they don’t have to mimic each other’s speech patters, they already have that. Sentences don’t end, they talk over each other and use short-hand, the way people who know each other well do.

This isn’t a tale about playing God, but a gentle take on nature versus nurture, coming down firmly on nurture’s side. It’s short, sharp and to the point, but it doesn’t beat you over the head with the message; the playwright prefers to show rather than tell.

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

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