The acting outweighs the plot-holes
Just back from A Number at the Bridge - a revival after 18 years of the Caryl Churchill success.
It doesn’t really matter that the assumptions about cloning here are simply wrong (you don’t get embryonic stem cells from a two year old, you don’t clone 20 mammalian duplicates from one blastoma) – this is really a play about (failed) relationships – the fact that these are with three ‘identical’ people, two of them badly damaged by their ‘father’ – adds poignancy, but this isn’t really about clones, or the ethics surrounding cloning.
At one level, it’s a simple domestic tragedy (with comic moments).
It needs a good cast, and Roger Allam plays the (flawed) father with tenderness and empathy, Colin Morgan three (or perhaps only two and the original) of the clones with great care, making them different people.
The play is only an hour long, with some tendentious music in the scene change blackouts, but with superb and surprising changes of focus (and great use of a concealed revolve) in a single room on a thrust stage, so that we see, in sequence, all four walls of that single room as the back of the set, the other three disappeared. Cleverly done.
Maybe the play isn’t as good as it was first thought to be, but with this cast it’s no waste of 60 minutes.