A Number. By Caryl Churchill. Rating ★★★
Royal Court Theatre, London, until 16 November 2002 www.royalcourttheatre.com/
How would it feel to find out that one is a clone? What would this knowledge do to one's sense of self and relationship to others, especially the other clone? This is this play's principal subject and it is handled in a creative and mostly fascinating manner. 
Cloning as a subject is both a benefit and a burden. It's hot. And many of those who chose to treat it in dramatic form have got burned in the process. Eva Hoffman's novel The Secret is but one disappointing example of works that sink beneath the weight of contorted scientific exposition, moral conceits, and characters who exist merely to prove a point. There is a bit of that here, but not much.
Dealing dramatically with moral issues is also highly topical but difficult. All too often, we are presented with unpersuasive drama clinging to a scaffold of moral points. Churchill largely avoids this trap as well. She touches on the central moral and metaphysical issues presented by cloning, but her focus is tight.
The play is spare in every sense—only an hour in length, with minimalist staging, and with only two actors, Michael Gambon and Daniel Craig.
Gambon is Salter, father of three sons who are clones. Craig is—sequentially—B1, B2, and Michael Black. Although he wears the same jeans and T shirt throughout, he transforms himself into three very different characters by accent, gesture, and facial expression. Gambon's performance is mannered, fussy, and emotionally unconvincing.
When he learns that he had been cloned from an older sibling, B2—a sensitive and gentle person—compares his reaction to finding out that he was a twin who'd been separated from his brother at birth. “A twin would be a surprise,” he says, “but a number, any number, is a shock.”
Whether the act of cloning is a moral and legal wrong is explored in various ways. The greedy Salter wants to sue. When he lies to B2—telling him that he was the original—he says that “the cells from which the other clones were made “were stolen from you and you should get your rights.”
B2 feels that he's not authentic. “I'm just a copy. I'm not the real one,” he says.
B1 is full of rage at the very real wrong that was done to him by a distant and unloving father. “You sent me away and had this other one made from some bit of my body . . . and you threw the rest of me away.” Salter replaced him like a defective product.
What I liked best about the play is Churchill's evocation of the doppelganger—a theme that has fascinated psychologists, including Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank. In his essay on “The Uncanny,” Freud describes various kinds of doubles. Some just look alike. Others show signs of mental telepathy. Still others undergo what he calls a doubling, dividing, and interchanging of the self.
Particularly frightening are doubles whose appearance heralds psychological disintegration or death. B2 tries to run away from B1—the displaced and replaced first child—whom, he believes, has been stalking him. “Don't they say you die if you meet yourself?” asks B2.
So where does our individuality reside? Is it all in the genes? Clearly not. As Michael Black—the banal clone—tells Salter, “We've got 99% the same genes as any other person . . . We've got 30% the same as a lettuce. Does that cheer you up at all?”
Figure.
ROYAL COURT THEATRE
Send in the clones: Daniel Craig and Michael Gambon in A Number