Caryl Churchill’s 50-minute science-fiction parable on human cloning doesn’t discuss the ethics; it merely observes the effects and asks whether it is nature or nurture which determines a person’s character?
A father’s son died in a car crash and he wanted another boy, an exact replica. Years later he learns that the hospital, without his permission, had used the genetic material and there are now 20 clones. Can you imagine what it would be like to be walking down the street and come face to face with yourself and wondering whether you are the original or merely a copy? The father is thinking of suing the hospital and making a fortune.
Jonathan Munby’s production, acted in the round in intimate surroundings under a low ceiling of hanging test-tubes, has the added immense advantage of two excellent actors who are father and son in real life. Timothy West (as the mercenary father) and Sam West (as three identical men, sharply differentiated in character) make a complex, fragmentary, unpunctuated text seem easy. The timing is everything.