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 planet. Today, we talk not only of the threat of global warming but also, 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, with nanotechnology, will 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 goat and sheep) 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 have been lagging far behind. We barely keep pace with the sociological implications of such new communication tools as Facebook and Twitter.
The psychological consequences for humanity of this brave new world is 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 premiere at the Fugard Theatre’s studio space in Cape Town, in a highly acclaimed British production.
“The space was once a church and here they are doing a play about man who has played God,” says director Jonathan Munby.
Marriage of form and content
Taking the roles of father and sons are real-life father and son Timothy and Samuel West. Both actors are well known to local audiences from their too-many-to-list film and teleÂvision performances. For his sins, Timothy West played PW Botha in Endgame (2009).
Samuel West ventures that, “with the death of Harold Pinter”, ÂChurchill is arguably the United Kingdom’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 easily bored by the plays that she has already done. When she has 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 says she is “very elusive to pin down as a stylist. Her extraordinary use of dramatic text is very unfamiliar, 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,” says 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 [about] what it would be like to do this play with someone who wasn’t your dad,” says 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.”
Then he laughs. “It certainly hasn’t drawn us apart!”
Engaging on another level
Says Munby: “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’, hits 10 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’.”
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 is going to be a completely different conversation from the one we had in London.”
Says Samuel West: “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.”
Says Munby: “Churchill is more interested in humanity and 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 whether cloning is right or wrong.”
Timothy West comments that “there has officially never been an example of human cloning — that we know of — but we know it is theoretically possible”.
A Number runs at the Fugard Theatre until October 29