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.

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