Caryl Churchill’s A Number returns to the London stage, asking huge questions

A Number

Old Vic, London

One of the great ironies of Caryl Churchill’s A Number is that it invites every new staging to begin it afresh. Churchill could have told this haunting story about cloning and identity through a novel or a poem; the fact that she chose drama — a form that has serial interpretation stamped into its DNA — only adds to the brilliance of this succinct 2002 masterpiece.

This time it’s Lennie James and Paapa Essiedu playing father and son(s). We first meet the two, in Lyndsey Turner’s excellent production, mid-argument — like so many parents and children. The father, Salter, fiddles in the kitchen; the son, Bernard, flings himself into a chair. Their familiarity is palpable. But the substance of the row is about to unravel all of that.

The son has just discovered that he is one of “a number”: a set of identical humans cloned from an original. Every shred of their relationship is being reconfigured in his mind. More shocking still, he’s not even number one: somewhere out there is another, older him — a son five years his senior who grew up in care. Before long, Bernard 1 is in the kitchen too, with his own set of questions.

This is the sort of material that, in other hands, could prove dense and intractable. But Churchill handles it with a feather-light touch, deceptive simplicity and, most importantly, a wealth of compassion. What starts out as an apparent case study in medical ethics becomes a deep dive into what makes us human. In a few short, simple scenes, Churchill creates a tragedy that has echoes of Cain and Abel, the ancient Greeks and Shakespeare.

We gradually get the measure of the way science has enabled Salter, having failed as a father to his first son, to start over. It’s a play that poses far-reaching questions about parenting, about mistakes, about nature and nurture, free will and predisposition. Life’s not a rehearsal, we’re told — except here it can be. If you had the chance, would you start again, do it better? Could you?

Its genius as drama is that it relies on the skill of the actors to scope out the minute shifts in body language that bring those questions alive. In Turner’s deftly calibrated staging, Essiedu is mesmerising as multiple iterations of one person. As Bernard 2, he pads about the living room, apparently at ease. But his hands, either buried in the cuffs of his overlong sweater sleeves or nervously flexing and grasping the air, tell a story of deep-set insecurity. As Bernard 1, the original, abandoned son, he is tighter, sharper, angrier. But as he listens to his father explain why he gave him up, he becomes entirely still — we see a man sunk in deep, bewildered pain. It’s a superbly detailed performance.

James is equally impressive as the father who subtly shape-shifts before us, peeling away protective layers. He potters about his neat kitchen, finding cups, straightening up. It’s soon clear, however, that this house-proud precision is part of his story to himself about being a good person — getting it right this time, bringing up the ideal son. It’s a superlative production, combining the tension of a thriller with the emotional depth of tragedy.

Designer Es Devlin traps the characters in a red box of a home, where the fixtures and fittings have become featureless — a kind of nightmarish nowhereville. It’s replaced in the final scene by a gallery lined with empty portrait frames, where Salter meets one further “son”: a blandly nice American man who is happy with his life. Salter, now riddled with guilt, presses him as to what makes him unique. The young man shrugs. “I like blue socks,” he says. And with that, Churchill neatly hands that same question over to her audience.

★★★★★

To March 19, oldvictheatre.com

The Glow

Royal Court, London

Alistair McDowall’s new play The Glow begins with a glow. A single lantern slowly illuminates a dark stage as Mrs Lyall, a Victorian spiritualist, casts its light around an inky black cell in an asylum until she finds what she is looking for: a cowering, nameless girl who can become her new assistant. “Would you mind my taking a step closer?” she asks. “So I might let the light find you?”

In essence that is what both she and the play do, shining a light on something far stranger, deeper and richer than Mrs Lyall had bargained for. We begin in Victorian haunted-house territory, with the nameless woman attending seances and responding with unnerving physicality, apparently possessed by deceased spirits. But soon Mrs Lyall’s sullen, suspicious son (Fisayo Akinade, very funny) has spotted how odd the woman is. “She is something other,” he complains. Quite what is the question that drives this dazzling, audacious and elusive drama.

McDowall is, in a sense, a successor to Caryl Churchill. Like Churchill, he uses the stage space to create peculiar, self-contained worlds that act as a mirror to our own. His X, which also premiered at the Royal Court, was set on a research station on Pluto and bent time to explore memory and identity, grief and loss.

Those themes resurface again in The Glow, as does a rumbling lament about climate change and a loss of connection with the Earth. But this play is more ambitious and more eccentric yet. Here Mrs Lyall’s instinct to cheat death and reach into eternity proves key as the play slips its moorings and roves across time, rolling from glimpses of pre-history, Roman Britain and Arthurian legend to the 1970s and 1990s and even the heat death of the universe.

Our woman is a constant throughout: a time-travelling stranger or spirit, permanently in search of a home. She becomes symbolic of humanity’s nagging sense of profound loneliness: the root of legend, myth and religion. McDowall has said of the play, “I want it to feel like there’s a vast, undulating network of stories that you only get a sliver of”, and he works to give the audience the same bird’s-eye view as the woman, stepping outside linear time, allowing patterns to emerge and overlap.

It’s about the role of story in trying to grasp for meaning, then, but it’s also concerned with the role of basic kindness in facing down that loneliness. Two solitary characters offer protection for the woman — a wounded knight and a retired nurse grieving for her lost son — and she responds by helping them.

That human detail becomes the touchstone for Vicky Featherstone’s staging. Merle Hensel’s imposing set of slanted, creeping walls and a shifting portal keeps the setting timeless, Jessica Hung Han Yun’s eloquent lighting design sculpts the space and Tal Rosner’s crackling videos shift us through time periods. The acting, however, is firmly rooted, Akinade particularly good as both the spiritualist’s sceptical son and a 1970s student obsessed with mythology and folklore; Rakie Ayola is sharp and ruthless as the spiritualist, weary and wise as the nurse. Ria Zmitrowicz is remarkable as the woman, gradually fleshing out this otherworldly figure with all-too human traits.

It’s a strange, restless piece and some scenes land less well on stage than they might in the imagination. But this is still a play of rare ambition and scope.

★★★★☆

To March 5, royalcourttheatre.com