Caryl Churchill, A Number, The Library Theatre until May 9
Caryl Churchill’s 2002 play deals with a contentious issue, human cloning, but is as interested in making cloning into a metaphor as it is in ethics and science. The play’s success depends on a difficult balance between argument and feeling, exploring ideas and manipulating its audience’s emotions.
In this production, the play’s airy, sometimes abstract conversations are well grounded in the realist set and the confident exchanges between John Benfield (as Salter, the father) and Daniel Casey, who plays three of his sons (the natural son, the adopted cloned son, and the unknown cloned son). The play hinges on Casey’s performance and he does a terrific job in varying his voice and appearance, tormented and thuggish as one son, sensitive as another, and playing the role with a matter-of-fact imperturbability as the third. Their conversations play out familiar arguments about scientific research, and our inability to think ethically about the ‘science of the possible’. Churchill is cogent and wry, presenting the father’s immediate interest in pursuing legal damages (another ‘number’) alongside the sons’ existential terror at the fact of replication.
Is the play more than a provoking think-piece about cloning? This production suggests at least two other ways of approaching the text. Salter’s encounters with his first-born son, in particular, are visceral and affecting, and his rivalry with his brothers and rage at his father are convincing and gripping. The play is so deftly written that it also holds up as a critique of authority and destiny, with both sons and father lamenting the absent god who has ‘done a number,’ abandoning them to their near-identical fates. At just over an hour, then, A Number is well worth seeing: there are not many writers or productions which can juggle together a number of different ideas and styles so tellingly.
John McAuliffe