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by Caryl Churchill, directed by David Storch

CanStage, Berkeley Street Theatre, Toronto

January 12-February 11, 2006

"My Three Sons: The Next Generation"

British playwright Caryl Churchill's play "A Number" from 2002 is now receiving its Canadian premiere at CanStage.  It is an absolutely fascinating work that packs more mystery and ideas into its 55 minutes than most plays do in two or three times its length.  Unfortunately, the cast and direction do not always rise to the level of the text.

The play consists of five encounters between an older man named Salter (though no names are used in the dialogue) and a young man who may be his son.  "May be" are the all-important words since the action, set sometime in the near future, is about cloning.  The first young man named Bernard has come to Salter because he has just seen a man who looks exactly like him and wants Salter to tell him what happened and if he is the original or just a copy.  The second young man, also named Bernard, but slightly older and with an air of danger about him visits Salter for the same reasons.  Each Bernard comes back for a second confrontation because to their dismay, and ours, Salter does not tell the same story and always alters it under pressure.

The first story is the more palatable.  Salter claims that his wife and only son died in a car accident and his had his son cloned because his son was so perfect.  The doctors at the hospital, however, did not make one copy, but twenty, supposedly without his knowledge.  In his second version he claims that when his wife died his son became unmanageable so at age four he sent him away to have a copy made so that he could "start over" with new one.  Again, more copies were made than were authorized.  Neither story is satisfactory.  Salter insists he will sue the hospital, but in unspecified time covered by the action, he never even begins proceedings.  All we know for sure is that the son who finally believes he is the original is bent on killing the copy raised in his place.  In the final encounter we meet a third look-alike called Michael Black, who, unlike the first two, seems to be meeting Salter for the first time and is totally unperturbed that he may be a clone.

Churchill's story asks what the fundamental characteristics of identity are--biological, social, cultural.  Since all three look-alikes act in completely different ways, she seems to suggest that no matter how well man can replicate nature, nurture and relationships are what define the self.  At another level, Churchill asks what we accept as "truth" in a play.  What makes us accept that actors who are not related are supposed to be father and son?  And how to we make that judgement?  By the time Salter meets his third "son", we feel he has experienced a major tragedy, the loss of the two Bernards, even though we can never be certain of the facts behind it.

Director David Storch and designer Robin Fisher have make the set in the Berkeley Street Theatre Upstairs an raised runway with the audience on both sides, audience, appropriately enough, staring at audience.  On stage are two identical chairs set at the extremes of this runway facing each other--another clever visual metaphor.

Where the production fails is in the actors' handling of the text which consists, not unlike Beckett or Pinter, almost entirely of isolated words and fragments of sentences.  Both Gary Reineke as Salter and Shawn Doyle as the three "sons" read these fragments rapidly as if all they signified were anger and confusion.  Well-played Beckett or Pinter show that much more can be made of such a text, an atmosphere of dread or hopelessness created or a sense of power games being played.  One leaves feeling Storch and the actors have not fully explored the play.

Reineke, really too old for the part, seems more like a grandfather than a father to the younger man but does get more out of the fragments' ambiguities than Doyle.  Doyle is excellent at clearly differentiating the three sons, but approaches the fragments only as keys to naturalistic acting.  Lighting designer Kimberley Purtell should concentrate on creating atmosphere and not on creating flashing futuristic patterns on the space between the chairs as if we were on the Starship Enterprise.  For his part Storch stages the encounters well, but we don't really feel the sense of mounting anxiety that Churchill seems to ask for.  She certainly wouldn't want us to exit to the Beach Boys' song "God Only Knows", which succeeds in trivializing the whole evening.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Shawn Doyle and Gary Reineke.