The Big Interview: Sam West

The Big Interview: Sam West  

 

 

By Nick Ahad
Published on Monday 21 May 2012 00:00

Sam West is a good looking chap who has appeared on screen with Julia Roberts and managed not to look like Quasimodo. He’s a respected director as well as a much admired actor and fiercely intelligent. He has charisma by the bucketload and exudes star quality.

But sitting opposite him in the wardrobe in the bowels of the Newcastle theatre I discover something else. Sam West is a total geek.
He’s excited about all the books on post-Great War Britain he’s been reading for research, he’s still got the sheet music from the first single he bought in 1978 – Hit me With Your Rhythm Stick – he’s really excited by the history of coal, he’s thrilled to bits to share the news that he kept a section of the famous carpet from the pre-refurbishment Sheffield Crucible. He is also, I happen to know of old, an avid birdwatcher.
Total geek.

And yet he remains pretty cool. Indeed, one of the things he has collected – the man is clearly a hoarder – is a call sheet from the last movie he appeared in and the story has more than an air of cool about it. “I was filming a movie for Focus International in April called Hyde Park on Hudson will Bill Murray, Olivia Coleman, Laura Linney – some quite brilliant people. Elizabeth Wilson was in it – she played Dustin Hoffman’s mother in The Graduate, was in Hitchcock’s The Birds and Notorious in 1946 with Cary Grant. It’s so remarkable to meet and work with someone like that and to be a few handshakes away from such greatness.
“In the movie Bill plays Roosevelt and I play King George VI. One day we were filming a nine-minute two-hander with just me and Bill – I kept the call sheet from that day – it just had my name and Bill’s name on it. It might not be a nine-minute two-hander in the final cut, but that was a great day.”
It’s stories like that, that make West undeniably impressive, but he immediately pulls the rug from under the feet of his own claims to cool.
“One day shortly before filming I found myself going to an out-of-the-way underground club in London to see the modern version of Booker T and the MGs – the Stax houseband (he gets very excited about this).
“They were amazing, playing Green Onions and Knock on Wood. Then someone who looked familiar came on to sing a number with them, holding a tambourine – and it was Bill. The following day I was in the make-up trailer and Bill came in. I said ‘I saw you on stage last night’ and briefly I became cool because it was this little out of the way club with 200 very hip people and I just happened to be one of them.”
The way he tells it, Sam West is a man in the right place at the right time and it might be tempting to consider that his career – like that of any actor – as a case of lucky timing. The truth is he has worked hard at his success. Perhaps being the son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales means that you have to work extra hard to prove yourself.
He certainly worked like a Trojan when he was running Sheffield Theatres for a couple of years from 2005 and he appears to have barely aged a day since he was appointed artistic director of the theatres (the Crucible, Lyceum and Studio) replacing the highly regarded Michael Grandage. They were big shoes to fill and West did an impressive job – but it ended on a less than positive note.
The Crucible was closing for refurbishment and West wanted to remain in post – and keep the theatre producing work – while it took place. The board didn’t agree and he left.
“The best thing I can say about Sheffield is that I enjoyed my first two seasons very much and would liked to have had a third – but there was a disagreement. Although it was amicable, it was also a disagreement,” he says, resolutely.
“I wanted to keep producing work but for all sorts of perfectly justifiable reasons they thought we couldn’t afford or handle it. I felt we should keep making work while the theatre was shut at all costs.”
Sour grapes? If there are any, West isn’t saying.
“I am delighted that since the theatre re-opened they seem to have re-captured their audience but that’s because Dan (Evans, the current artistic director) is doing very good work with some very good people.
“When Dan was appointed, in one of his first speeches – I think one of the first things he said – was that he was pleased that I had been there and taken the theatre into the refurbishment.
“My concern was that Michael had done such a great job in handing things over to his successor – me – that I wanted to feel I had done the same thing. When I left I didn’t even know who the new artistic director would be, so I never had that opportunity.
“When Dan thanked me, it felt like I had – that awful word – a sense of closure. It was a nod to me and what I had done and that was all that I felt I needed, nothing more than that.”
He has returned to Sheffield a number of times since and “had some very good evenings” but has not felt the need to keep harking back to that period. In fact, since leaving, he has had some of the best professional experiences of his career. He played the lead in Enron in the West End, one of the theatre world’s major hits of the last decade, has appeared in A Number in South Africa opposite his father Timothy (“we played together on his 76th and 77th birthday”) and in ITV series Eternal Law, had the biggest TV role of his career.
Filmed in York and written by the team behind Life on Mars, West played an angel sent to earth as a lawyer to help mankind. “It was absolutely the most enjoyable television job I’ve ever done. I’ve played leads in shows like Narnia and Cambridge Spies, but this was a lead in a six-part series filmed for three months. It was in York, in late spring and early summer, I had a little house next to Orla Brady and we used to have soup and learn our lines together. I worked 61 days out of 64 on the shoot, I’d walk to work, it was lovely.”
The show didn’t find an audience – or it did, three million, but it wasn’t the five million needed to return to the screen. The lack of another series is a shame, West clearly feels, but he has plenty to keep him busy.
What is doing that and making him buzz almost out of his seat in Newcastle, is Close the Coalhouse Door. Alan Plater’s early play is being revived for the first time since the playwright’s death in 2010.
“I’ve been mostly buying and reading books for the play – which is a list that unfortunately never ends. One arrived today called Communism in the Bible which is a really exciting and important book.”
I laugh at this, not the idea that the book is important, but that Communism in the Bible is exciting. West does not laugh along. He’s perfectly serious. “I can’t wait to get stuck into it. I’ve been talking to Paul Younger from Newcastle University, a civil engineer and an expert on water. But he’s also a Christian Socialist and knows a lot about the Prims, the Primitive Methodists, who took the Bible as a sort of radical text – very popular with pitmen in the 1860s. A lot of South American liberation theologists do today in fact, basically...”
And he’s off. It’s difficult to explain just how excited West is about the idea of pitmen’s religious beliefs in the 1860s. He’s almost as excited as he is about discovering that a member of the acting union Equity, is an expert in British political history from 1910 to 1926.
“He spent two years studying that 16- year period, can you imagine,” asks West. I really can’t. “It was the most fascinating period of British history...” He then gets excited about coal fields.
He also gets very excited about politics. Over the past few years he has become one of the arts world’s leading public figures in speaking out against the cuts to public funding of the sector. The fierce intellect, endless curiosity, the politics, make him the perfect person to lead a production of Close the Coalhouse Door.
Based on the stories of Sid Chaplin, Alan Plater’s play was first performed in Newcastle in 1968. It’s set around a wedding anniversary party and charts the major strikes, victories and disappointments in British mining history from the formation of the first unions in 1831. The story is structured around Alex Glasgow’s joyful and heart-tugging music inspired by north-eastern folk songs performed by highly-skilled actor-musicians and in this latest version has seen a script revision by Billy Elliott writer Lee Hall.
“It sounds facile, but it’s true – it’s a great honour to have been given responsibility of the first revival since he died of Alan’s best known play.
“We will have people who remember the first production, people who have never heard of it, those who won’t have the first inkling of what a miner’s life was like and it has to speak to all of them.
“I think when we bring the show to Yorkshire, it will really speak to people who feel connected to the history of manufacturing through their towns and the industry that was once there. In fact, did you know...”
He’s off again. The coolest geek you might ever meet.
Close the Coalhouse Door, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, May 23 – 26. York Theatre Royal June 26 - 30.

 

Close the Coalhouse Door delivers miners' message

11 April 2012

By Ian Youngs Arts reporter, BBC News

Director Samuel West and writer Lee Hall hope a revival of Alan Plater's 1968 play Close the Coalhouse Door can teach a new generation about fighting for their rights.



Mining is a theme in Lee Hall's work from Billy Elliot
to The Pitmen Painters. Photo: NCJ Media



When I put my first question to Samuel West, a simple query about his motivation for staging Close the Coalhouse Door, he begins his answer with the words: "I make no secret of the fact that I disagree with the direction of our current government..."

The play is 44 years old and centres on the lives of miners in Newcastle, so it may seem odd that the conversation immediately turns to modern politics.

But Samuel West - the actor-director who starred in Howard's End and the play Enron - and Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall are both political animals.
So it soon transpires that there is more to this revival, which opens at Northern Stage in Newcastle on Friday, than just the resurrection of a neglected theatrical treasure.
When the play first came to the city in 1968, it was a massive hit.
Stories of pitmen going to the theatre instead of the football on a Saturday afternoon, and of coachloads of miners rolling up at the theatre in their Sunday best, have passed into local legend.
The plot revolves around a Newcastle family looking back on 140 years of miners' struggles against pit-owners and politicians.


Actor-turned-director Samuel West: "It was a story that needed to be told." Photo: Topher McGrillis



But Plater's irreverent saga of bickering brothers and plucky underdogs, coupled with songs by Alex Glasgow, is more than just a dry lesson in the history of industrial relations.

Starting in the 1830s, it recounts how pioneering unions formed, and went on strike, in protest at long hours worked by young boys and "bonds" that tied miners to punishing rules and conditions.

By joining together for strength in the face of hardship, the miners gradually won more rights as the decades wore on.

 


"The play becomes very relevant because it is a celebration of having collectively achieved something as a nation that I think we're in danger of throwing away," says Hall.

"It's a reminder that the life we rely on now was not always the case. People had to fight for it."
The play has lessons for people hit by of the current financial crisis and austerity cuts, he believes.


Close the Coalhouse Door opens at Northern Stage
 in Newcastle before going on a UK tour



"There's a feeling now that it's so hopeless and there's nothing we can do and we just have to put up with it because it's the inexorable forces of history and economics.

"[In the play] you see that every 30 or 40 years, just in one industry alone, exactly the same things happen again and again.
"But what they didn't do was just to sit and take it. What they did do was to fight back."
The play is "very provocative" in today's climate, he says.
West, the son of British acting legends Timothy West and Prunella Scales and a former member of the Socialist Workers' Party, is similarly strident.
He accuses the coalition government of using the financial crisis as "an excuse" to reduce living standards and turn individuals against each other.
"That's not how progress is made and it isn't how the miners progressed in this country," he says. "I thought it was a story that needed to be told, really."
West winces at the thought he is "preaching" and insists it is a good piece of theatre. "It's not at all narrow agitprop."



Many people will disagree with the pair's politics and with Plater's interpretation of history, which firmly pits the gutsy workers against the evil elite.

And while it was a hit in Newcastle first time around, the play was a flop when it moved to the West End.



The play was televised by the BBC in 1968



The north-east folk story, dominated by the mining industry's heroes and villains, did not strike a chord in London. The thick Geordie brogue probably did not help.

This time the show, a co-production between Northern Stage and Live Theatre in Newcastle, is going on tour after its run in the city.

Hall and West are confident that it will fare better in places like Richmond-upon-Thames, Guildford and Oxford than it did in the West End.

For the new version, Hall, a friend and protege of Plater, has added a short scene at the beginning to take people back to 1968, and one at the end that gives the 1968 family's rose-tinted vision of how the next 44 years would pan out.



Alan Plater was made a CBE for services to drama in 2005, five years before his death



Unfortunately, Newcastle United have not ended up as winners of the European Cup for 15 years in a row.

But Hall and West want the miners of the past to deliver a serious message to the audiences of the present. So what difference can a show like this really make?

"I'm not sure that plays can make any difference, but they can make people think," Hall says.

"If it reminds one single person that what is purported to be inevitable is not inevitable, then it will have been worth reviving.

"I think its big message is that the people of the 99%, the ordinary people, have some power and can alter things. I think it's a timely reminder to people that that is the case."

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

Interview: Actor Sam West on Close the Coalhouse Door

15/02/2012

As a new production of Close the Coalhouse Door starts to take shape, actor-director Sam West talks to BARBARA HODGSON about his role in reviving a Northern classic

IN 1962 when Close the Coalhouse Door made its debut in Newcastle local people turned out in their droves, ensuring an instant sell-out.
What for many was a rare night at the theatre stirred regional pride.
At the heart of Alan Plater’s musical play – based on stories by Sid Chaplin – were working class heroes, miners and their families.
Knitted into the story of a couple’s golden wedding party were threads of mining history, flashbacks to hopes and disappointments with plenty of laughter along the way, while pulsating through it all were the vibrant songs of socialist songwriter Alex Glasgow.
It was political, pickaxe-rattling stuff long before the decimation of the coal mining industry in the 1980s really got the blood flowing.
After the warmth of its welcome in Newcastle, its transfer to London’s West End met with a reception that could be described at best as tepid.

But that was then, and we’ve since seen modern Northern classics such as Lee Hall’s Billy Elliot and The Pitmen Painters seduce Southern audiences with their spirit and charm.
Now even Sting is getting in on the act with his plans for a Wallsend shipyards-inspired musical called The Last Ship.
It will be interesting to see how a revival of Close the Coalhouse Door – opening in April on the site of its debut at the former Newcastle Playhouse, now Northern Stage – will be received this time when it goes on tour.
“It didn’t do particularly well then in London. It should have done!” says Sam West who’s directing the new production, a collaboration between Northern Stage and Live Theatre, which is based on Newcastle Quayside.
The London-based actor director – nominated for a BAFTA for his role in 1992 Merchant Ivory film Howards End and star of the just ended ITV1 series Eternal Law – is fully aware of his responsibility in taking over a Northern classic, whose creators are now all dead. “That’s one of the slight pressures of doing it here,” admits the 45-year-old when I catch up with him at Northern Stage, “but it’s a nice pressure.”
West remains best known for his stage, TV and film roles, but recent years – including his spell as artistic director of Sheffield Theatres – have seen him make his name as a director. He’s also recently directed his first radio play.
Hearing his enthusiasm for his new project, which will see Lee Hall write new material to bring the story up to date, assures us it’s in a safe pair of hands.
West has done his homework. He makes passing reference to visiting Woodhorn, the former colliery-turned museum in Northumberland, and when I mention the work of local photographer Keith Pattison, who covered the 1984-85 miners’ strike in Easington, he already knows it.
The background of the play is something West can connect with, regardless of what his own growing up as the son of famous acting parents Timothy West and Prunella Scales, might have been like.
At university he joined the Socialist Workers Party and was briefly a member of the Socialist Alliance. He mentions he’s a member of the council of Equity, the actors’ union, and while he’s not talking about himself when he says “sometimes you need a terrier to fight your corner”, you get the impression he could.
As an 18-year-old, West was in Western Australia, where his mother was directing his father in Uncle Vanya, at the time Alex Glasgow emigrated there with his family and he muses he could have passed the late singer-songwriter in the street.
As it happens, his connection with the play came about by chance.
He recalls that after Plater’s death he’d read an obituary praising the brilliance of Close the Coalhouse Door. Then he met Michael Chaplin – writer son of Sid – at a wedding and brought up the subject.
“I said, ‘I wonder who will revive the play’ and he said ‘why don’t you revive it’? I thought ‘that’s not going to happen’.” However, there followed talks involving Max Roberts, artistic director of Live Theatre and also Plater’s son-in-law, and Erica Whyman, chief executive of Northern Stage, and the seeds of a collaboration took root.
“And that was that,” says West. “They asked me, I was free and it’s very exciting.”
Previous revivals of the play don’t seem to have had the buzz of this one, which has Hall incorporating the 1984-85 Miners’ Strike.
He and West, who changed their mind about the initial idea of including a new song, have been deep in discussion about it in the capital (Hall’s home is just around the corner from West’s) ahead of Newcastle rehearsals which are soon to start.
On the day I meet West, cast details have been finalised but not yet released.


Having just spoken of a conversation with a North East taxi driver who’d seen Billy Elliot in London and remarked that the actors didn’t have proper Easington accents, West says: “You have to get it right and that’s something we’re going to try to do.
“The actors will be native to the North East or very convincing Geordies.”
West intends to tread carefully with the play, striking just the right note to bridge the time gap and connect with those too young to have a memory of the 1980s strike let alone the play’s 1960s context.
“One of the things I’m trying to do with Lee is to get back to that ‘68 version and to open it out in ways that are more about being true to the 68 version.”
In terms of framework, Plater’s play will sit in the middle rather than be part of an updated whole.
“We’re trying to preserve the piece,” says West. “I don’t want to say too much about it. We want it be a nice surprise.
“It will be good, it will be subtle and hard hitting.”

He adds: “We’re certainly intending to use all Alex’s original music. The play has beautiful songs and beautiful writing.
“One of the very interesting things about talking to Michael about his dad was how Sid’s style had come out in this play.”
Those rich stories, convincingly brought to life on stage, become important memories, he suggests, “when you destroy an industry like Margaret Thatcher did”.
“Culture nowadays is becoming about dressing up in the evenings for posh people and we have to remind ourselves that stories belong to the people.”
He’s looking forward to working in Newcastle, where in the past he has starred in RSC productions of Richard ll and (his award-winning) Hamlet.
West is glad, he says, that he doesn’t have to make his living as a director: “I find it much more difficult that acting.
“When actors say no to me, and they might for all sorts of reasons, I tend to take it terribly personally, but I can say no for the same reasons!” Ideally, he’d like to keep his hand in with directing once or twice a year, alongside his acting and also radio work.
He’s incredibly busy.
“I did Enron, which ran for almost a year, and last year I did a TV series and a film,” he says.
He recently starred alongside his father in Caryl Churchill’s two-hander A Number, a play about cloning which revisits the nature versus nurture debate.
It took them to Cape Town where his father “did a great performance– at 77!” He laughs: “My dad is just like a 25-year-old, if he’s unemployed for six weeks he gets really antsy.”
West’s mother, the former Fawlty Towers star, works “not so much”, he says, although they have just worked together on readings picked by Nicholas Parsons for the radio show, With Great Pleasure.
He’s just waiting to hear whether there’s to be another series of Eternal Law, where he loved being pitched in, student accommodation-like, and being able to walk to work in the beautiful city of York.
“I very much hope there will be. It was one of the happiest jobs I’ve ever done, and others enjoyed it.
“Whether they enjoyed it enough is another question.”
He hopes to be directing again towards the end of the year, and he also has a film coming out: Hyde Park On Hudson, about the royal visit George Vl made to President Roosevelt in 1939, in which he plays the king opposite Bill Murray’s President.
Following the meeting of the men who each struggled with a physical challenge – the king his stammer and Roosevelt with polio – George Vl returned with a renewed confidence, says West, in his role.
“I’m a republican but I think you have to recognise a job well done,” he adds.
Close the Coalhouse Door is at Northern Stage from April 13 until May 5 before heading off on a national tour which also takes in Gala Theatre in Durham from June 12-16. Visit www.northernstage.co.uk or call 0191 230 5151.


Read More http://www.journallive.co.uk/culture-newcastle/culture-latest-news//2012/02/15/interview-actor-sam-west-on-close-the-coalhouse-door-61634-30335099/2/#ixzz1nQOdAAD8

Samuel West Is A Law-Abiding Angel

By Marion McMullen on Jan 29, 12 09:04 PM

BRITISH actor Samuel West is flying high playing angelic solicitor Zak Gist in quirky legal drama Eternal Law
In a career that's spanned more than two decades, Samuel has played many different roles, from Shakespearean monarchs and princes, through to Dr Frankenstein and an infamous spy to tragic dreamers.
However, there was one gaping hole on his CV which, thankfully, has now been filled.
He hadn't made a habit of tackling heavenly bodies until Eternal Law came along. And his character here, Zak Gist, isn't just any angel - he's also a lawyer.
"He's a tough, uncompromising angel who's not afraid to break the rules - which makes him sound like every bad cop that's had a series based around him!" Samuel says with a grin.
"He is grumpy though. He's quite cynical. Angels do tours of duty like soldiers do, and they get pulled back when it all gets too much, which is what's started happening to Zak."

The basic premise comes from Matthew Graham and Ashley Pharoah of Life On Mars and Ashes To Ashes fame.
Joining Zak on Earth is his rookie angel sidekick Tom (Ukweli Roache). They rent rooms in the home of Mrs Sheringham (Orla Brady), a former angel who, unlike Zak, did give up immortality for the human she loved - only for him to die, leaving her bereft.
But there's another 'character' at the centre of the drama - the city of York.
The entire series was filmed on location there, with a former hospital overlooking the historic Minster providing studio and office space for the cast and crew.
It's a fittingly ethereal setting for this heavenly drama, and being there has given West a chance to reconnect with a county he feels is in his blood.
His actor parents - Timothy West and Prunella Scales - both grew up in Yorkshire, while Samuel himself, the elder of their two sons, lived there for two years until 2007.
"I used to run Sheffield Theatres and lived in Yorkshire, although North Yorkshire people believe that South Yorkshire folk are from a different country - and in some ways that's justified! I loved Sheffield and miss it very much."
Having grown up surrounded by show business, it seemed inevitable that he would become an actor.
After studying English Literature at Oxford University, he gained rave reviews for his professional acting debut as Michael in Cocteau's Les Parents Terribles.
Many acclaimed theatre roles have followed since, including the leads in Richard II and Hamlet for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
He gained a Bafta nomination for Howards End, in which he played Helena Bonham Carter's doomed lover, and other film and TV projects include Van Helsing, Notting Hill, and Cambridge Spies.
However, unlike many thespians of his age (he's 45), Samuel hasn't had what could be described as a signature role - until now.
Although he admits he doesn't have the analytical brain required to be a good lawyer like Zak, there are similarities between being an actor and a legal eagle.
"There's a certain amount of empathetic perception involved in defending somebody other people think might be guilty," he remarks.
"And there's a brilliant principle involved, which is being eroded at the moment thanks to the cuts in legal aid - that everybody deserves an equal chance before the law, whether they can afford it or not.
"I hope that this series will do something to remind people of that. It's a great system, and one that deserves to continue."
Coventry Telegraph

Sam West

Sam West

5 January 2012

I interviewed the actor Sam West today (that is him on the far right of the photo looking grumpy!) It's his character in a new television drama series which starts tonight called Eternal Law. It is from the creators of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, but instead of time-travelling policemen, sixties and seventies nostalgia and DCI Gene Hunt, this one is about angels sent down from heaven to work as lawyers.
Sam kind of threw me at the start of the interview saying he wanted to be called Samuel first and then Sam afterwards. But instead of that being an antsy actor thing, Samuel/Sam turned out to be one of the nicest guests I have ever had. Chatty, thoughtful, eager to come to Belfast so he could visit the City's Punk Shrines. I did suggest Terri Hooley could be his guide, but then wondered if he would survive such a tour!
Son of Timothy West and Prunella Scales, Sam comes from acting royalty. His parents are part of my childhood telly watching memories. Sybill in "Fawlty Towers" and that voice "Bas....illll". But it's his dad, Timothy West, who wins hands down. It's an episode of "Tales of the Unexpected". I remember he played a bee-keeper, who eats the jelly and ends up turning into a bee. The image of him at the end, buzzing and sprouting bee like hairs on the backs of his hands, freaked me out.
I tell Sam this. He says he's been told this before. It's called The Royal Jelly episode. A lot of people tell him it gave them nightmares. He says he's going to tell his dad and that he will be chuffed. Afterwards, I google the episode. It went out in March 1980. Still vivid all these years later. Put me off honey for life. *shudder*
"Eternal Law" is on ITV1 tonight at 9pm

BBC Artsextra

Backstage: Samuel West



Samuel West and his father Timothy share a scene



 

Backstage: Samuel West

Audrey Nyathi | 21 October, 2011 00:20

 

Samuel West, who stars with his father in 'A Number'

What is the play about?
Identity, love (and the lack thereof) and the crisis of self.

What attracted you to it?
The ideas of the play were things being discussed in the press: what made you "you", and the physical aspects of cloning.

The play features a father and son.
My father was available and we were pleased to act together.

Has the play changed your view of who you are?
Not really.
Psychiatrists and geneticists tell us that we're a 50-50 mixture of genetics and upbringing.
The play comes down more heavily on the side of nurture being the great aspect of change.
If that is a political point, I agree with it. There's been an enormous growth in the idea of genetic pre-determinism, particularly in terms of gender roles.
In an age of economic and political uncertainty, there's a move towards people being defined by their genetics.
This play refutes that idea, and it's important that we support that because we may only be one generation away from people being difficult to insure because of their genetic make-up.
Nobody is born a serial killer.

This play was first produced in the UK in 2006. What's it like returning to it now?
It's been an opportunity to take a fresh look at it and to question choices we made last time.
Caryl Churchill's writing is so rich and complex that returning to it affords us a chance to delve deeper.

• 'A Number' is on at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town until October 29. Call 021-461-4554 or visit www.thefugard.com for further info

Backstage: Samuel West

Backstage: Samuel West

Audrey Nyathi | 21 October, 2011 00:20



Samuel West and his father Timothy share a scene



Samuel West, who stars with his father in 'A Number'

What is the play about?
Identity, love (and the lack thereof) and the crisis of self.
What attracted you to it?
The ideas of the play were things being discussed in the press: what made you "you", and the physical aspects of cloning.
The play features a father and son. My father was available and we were pleased to act together.
Has the play changed your view of who you are?
Not really. Psychiatrists and geneticists tell us that we're a 50-50 mixture of genetics and upbringing. The play comes down more heavily on the side of nurture being the great aspect of change.
If that is a political point, I agree with it. There's been an enormous growth in the idea of genetic pre-determinism, particularly in terms of gender roles.
In an age of economic and political uncertainty, there's a move towards people being defined by their genetics.
This play refutes that idea, and it's important that we support that because we may only be one generation away from people being difficult to insure because of their genetic make-up.
Nobody is born a serial killer.
This play was first produced in the UK in 2006. What's it like returning to it now?
It's been an opportunity to take a fresh look at it and to question choices we made last time.
Caryl Churchill's writing is so rich and complex that returning to it affords us a chance to delve deeper.

• 'A Number' is on at the Fugard Theatre in Cape Town until October 29. Call 021-461-4554 or visit www.thefugard.com for further info

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.

Cloning: it’s an identity crisis

October 11 2011 at 09:05am
By Theresa Smith

---

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

http://realreview.co.za/

Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

Olivia Colman To Play Queen Elizabeth

May 6, 2011

Depressingly for those of us in the U.K. who would like to throw off the yoke of our apparently-appointed-by-god inbred oppressors, royalty is big business at the moment. Between the enormous, Oscar-winning success of "The King's Speech," and the royal wedding last week, the Windsors are back, and there's more than one film project in the works at present. For instance, Dakota Fanning is attached to play the young Princess Margaret in the romantic-comedy "Girl's Night Out," although that won't move forward until after director Michael Hoffman is done with "Gambit."

And George VI and his wife Elizabeth (played by Colin Firth and Helena Bonham-Carter in "The King's Speech") are heading back to the big-screen for the Roger Michell-helmed drama "Hyde Park On Hudson," which will examine the, ahem, "close friendship" between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and his distant cousin Margaret Suckley, against the background of King George's visit to New York, the first time a British monarch had ever set foot on American soil. Yesterday, Variety confirmed that, as rumored, Bill Murray would be playing the president, something that, typical for the actor, has taken over a year of courtship, and now we've got some news of who will likely be joining him.
Baz Bamigboye reports that Laura Linney is in the advanced stages of talks to play Margaret in the project, while British actors Samuel West and Olivia Colman are stepping into their compatriots' awards-laden shoes as King George and Queen Elizabeth. Linney is, of course, bloody marvellous, and seems to be an excellent fit for the part.
Their British counterparts are less familiar to U.S. audiences, but they're equally well-matched. West is a theater veteran, son of legendary British actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales, who's probably most familiar abroad for small roles in "Van Helsing" and "Iris." He's worked with Michell a number of times before, both on screen ("Notting Hill," "Persuasion"), and on stage, in an excellent 2007 production of Harold Pinter's "Betrayal," and he's been more prominent in recent years, thanks to the lead role in the hit play "Enron," as well as becoming a leading opponent to the current British government's program of cuts.
Meanwhile, Colman's also on the rise. A veteran of TV comedies like "Peep Show" and "Green Wing," she had a scene-stealing role in "Hot Fuzz," but she's taken a big step towards big-screen dramatic work this year, with a widely acclaimed lead performance in Paddy Considine's Sundance hit "Tyrannosaur" opposite Peter Mullan, and she's just wrapped up a role as Margaret Thatcher's daughter Carol in the Meryl Streep-toplining biopic "The Iron Lady." We're sure her role and West's will be far less prominent than in "The King's Speech," but they're certainly two performers who won't be afraid of being overshadowed by that film.
All in all, things are looking very promising here -- director Michell sometimes gets lumped in with the likes of John Madden and Mike Newell, but for the most part his films are terrific, particularly his low-key British pictures like "The Mother" and "Venus." He's assembled quite a cast for the project, and, although it's a while off, we'd put money on the 2013 Best Actor race being a presidential face-off between the long-overdue Murray and Daniel Day-Lewis in Spielberg's "Lincoln." Film4 and Focus are backing the project, which will be shopped at Cannes next week, with filming planned to get underway in July.

Indiewire - Laura Linney, Samuel West In Talks To Star Opposite Bill Murray's F.D.R. In 'Hyde Park On Hudson'

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

REVIEW: A NUMBER BY CARYL CHURCHILL AT MENIER CHOCOLATE FACTORY, LONDON

REVIEW: A NUMBER BY CARYL CHURCHILL AT MENIER CHOCOLATE FACTORY, LONDON

Timothy and Sam West star in Caryl Churchill's A Number/ Pic: Manuel Harlan

Friday October 8,2010

By Julie Carpenter

WHEN Caryl Churchill wrote this two hander in 2002, Dolly the Sheep was alive and well and cloning was an issue discussed around the water fountain.

Its topicality may have waned but while scientists continue to talk about our genetic predisposition towards anything from a cold to a killer instinct, this multi-faceted 50 minute play will still be relevant: its as much about what makes us the person we are (the nature/nurture debate) as it is about cloning.
There is an air of the futuristic horror story at the outset when an eerie green light illuminates the stage ceiling, revealing a grid full of identical test tubes.


We then witness a fraught discussion between a father, Salter, and his son, Bernard, who has discovered he is not his father's "original" child but is one of "a number" of clones.

 

Salter and his "sons" are played by real life father-and-son

It's a bit of a revelation for Salter, too. It turns out he knew his son was a clone but thought he was the only one made and is digesting the news that the geneticist he hired for the job actually created about 20. The disclosures come thick and fast as Bernard has an understandable crisis of identity and is forced to re-evaluate his father's character while we are introduced to the "real" son and one of the other clones.

What gives this production extra punch is that Salter and his "sons" are played by real life father-and-son Timothy and Sam West, who first performed the play at the Sheffield Crucible four years ago. Timothy creates a blinking, crumpled figure whose crimes have been masked by age while Sam, with a couple of deft costume changes, effectively switches between the alarmed Bernard to the hostile "original" Bernard to the blithely untouched clone, Michael.

Performed in the round, so heightening the sense of intimacy, the fragmented dialogue never gives us the whole picture. We are given brief encounters but while it all seems deceptively minimalist, the play's genius is that it raises a host of issues that keep you thinking long after you leave.

Churchill's point is ultimately that nurture is the winner in the nature/nurture debate: the discarded original Bernard is resentful and murderous as an adult, the well-treated Bernard clone is sensitive and better adjusted while Salter can find no connection whatsoever with the nice-but-boring maths teacher Michael.

Each clone, in other words, has his own distinct identity - much like this intriguing play.

Box office: 0207 907 7060, until November 5

Verdict: 4/5

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.