Send in the clones . . . maybe they can explain this muddle
A Number (Old Vic) Verdict: Doesn’t add up ★★☆☆☆☆ Doubt (Chichester Festival Theatre)
Verdict: Sure-fire hit ★★★★☆
MORAL dilemmas tend to go down well in theatre. They are red meat to an audience. But what a difference a play makes . . . At London’s Old Vic, Lennie James, star of Line Of Duty and Save Me, has taken a break from TV to appear alongside Paapa Essiedu in Caryl Churchill’s A Number: a 60-minute sketch, set in the future, about a father confronted by three sons, all of them clones.
So far, so intriguing. And yet, A Number is not just brief. It’s a slight theatrical doodle. It starts with one of the sons being assured he is the ‘original copy’ of a long-lost child.
Later, the young man comes to fear being killed by a brother clone who is angry at being betrayed by their putative father. That, at least, is my best guess at the rambling, self-contradictory set-up that ends with the father meeting a third cloned son — a happily married, American maths teacher who has three children and isn’t in the least bothered about not being unique.
SO whAT was all the fuss about? A Number feels like a maze without a centre, and after so many narrative dead ends, I simply lost interest.
It’s a script that needs rescuing by actors; and in Lyndsey Turner’s vividly staged production on Es Devlin’s sunset-red studio flat, James and Essiedu are at least watchable as they tramp in circles around each other.
James is tricky and evasive — a deadpan fibber offering ad-libbed assurances to his sons. Essiedu plays two kinds of needy young men, anxiously seeking certainty around their crumbling identities, as well as the blasé American who doesn’t care either way.
Both do their best to bring life to the contrived situation. But as a piece about the moral dilemmas of paternity, it has nothing to say. It is to fatherhood what phone contracts are to literature.
I live in hope that, one day, a production will illuminate this play for me. But I’m not holding my breath. n MEANwhILE, down in Chichester, there’s an infinitely superior moral poser: a gut-churning revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Doubt, starring Monica Dolan as a nun who suspects the school priest (Sam Spruell) of grooming one of her pupils. Best known from the film starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour hoffman, Doubt features a tightly drawn plot that’s as clever and manipulative as its leading characters are tense and suspicious.
As Sister Aloysius, headmistress of a Catholic boys’ school in New York’s Bronx of the 1960s, Dolan seems at first loftily authoritarian. And yet her forensic mind and steely determination to defend and nurture her pupils grows on us — even as our faith in Spruell’s charismatic priest, who is loved by the boys, begins to rot.
Dolan’s New York accent reminded me of Ruby wax and, in some terrifying turns of mood, she has wax’s ferocity, too.
Spruell’s lean, rangy physique and warm smile make us inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. But Sister Aloysius is having none of it.
‘where’s your compassion!?’ he pleads. ‘Nowhere you can get at it,’ she snarls.
I was completely enthralled by this titanic clash, in Lia williams’s cracking production staged, sardonically but significantly, in black and white. Costumes are sedulously precise, down to the hem of Dolan’s habit, soiled in the cloister gardens.
A distant piano lesson, squawking crows and moaning sirens add to a sense of peculiar unease. But most of all, the sepulchral setting creates a scale and solemnity equal to the play’s darkly unfolding themes.
Alas for us, the play has now been cancelled because of Covid. Pray for a life beyond Chichester.