Theatre night:A Number

In 2002, during the short life span of Dolly the sheep, Caryl Churchill wrote the play A Number. In it, she asked questions about the morality of cloning. Not cloning sheep but cloning human beings. Not just as babies but as they grow up to be adults.

What would these clones think about the scientists who had overseen such a large part of their creation? What would they think about the process from which they were birthed? How would they feel about their parents? Most curiously of all, what would it be like should two, or several, identical clones meet up?

Would they be alike? Would they like each other? Would they be able to understand and support each other or would they compete against each other or fight for dominance? Twenty years later, Lyndsey Turner has revived the play at the Old Vic in London with Lennie James as the father Salter and Paapa Essediu as his son Michael and two of an initially unspecified number of clones.

It tells, in a fat free seventy-five minutes, of what happens when Michael (as well as B1 and B2) confront Salter with their fears, their anxieties, and, most of all, their questions. It probes the impersonal nature of cloning with references to 'batches' and 'clusters' but also, and this is where the play gets really smart - even if at times it's head spinning, accepts that these people are people and still suffer all the same problems as the rest of us.

A Number tackles depression, alcoholism, male violence, identity, and the nature of what it is to be. What it is to be alive. Perhaps more than anything else though, it confronts fatherhood and father son relationships. Each of Salter's sons, should he choose to acknowledge them or not, have very different relationships with him and he with them.

There are no easy answers and, ultimately, the story becomes as much about Salter's quest for unlikely redemption as it is about Michael, B1, and B2 learning who they really are - and why they are like that. As Salter, James is excellent throughout. At times, tetchy, yet at others, sympathetic and trying to learn. But Essediu has the trickier job.

The costume changes he somehow manages happen so quickly as to be almost impossible but, more importantly, he brings each of the three characters to life in very different ways and these two fine performances, aided by Es Devlin's startling red set and Donato Wharton's soundtrack, ultimately make A Number a gripping, enjoyable, and thoughtful piece of theatre. Even more so, it feels a very unique play and anything but a clone.