Cloning Conundrum

This evening we caught up with a BBC2 drama from Wednesday, adapted from a 2002 stage play, which interestingly explored the challenge of human cloning to personal identity.

A Number by Caryl Churchill

It's often a problem when theatrical work is transferred to television, and particularly so in the case of Caryl Churchill, a writer of elliptical and oblique dramas that find their natural habitat in a hushed and darkened space where the audience is effectively locked in. What's more, she writes in a style you might describe as Mamet Mannerism, a meticulously crafted account of the hesitations and gaps of ordinary speech that sounds anything but ordinary after it's been passed through an actor's mouth. Fortunately, James Macdonald made virtually no concessions to television expectations in A Number. The medium permitted him a last-minute surprise that would have been impossible to do as well on stage – a coup de télévision, if you want – but it left intact the slow, unfurling mystery of Churchill's play.

A young man, played by Rhys Ifans, turned up at his father's house to ask for an explanation. He'd recently learnt that he was a clone, but all sorts of questions remained unanswered. Was he an original or a copy? Was his father really his father, and did he know more about why he was created in the first place? Above all, in the light of this knowledge, how could he tell who he was? The truth, or a veiled approximation of it, emerged fitfully as he talked to his father, played with shifty, panicked prevarication by Tom Wilkinson. And then one of the other clones turned up, rougher and unmistakably more dangerous than the first, and another dark twist to the story was revealed.

The subject was that hoary old intractability: nature versus nurture. But Churchill approached it with a collage of uncertainties, so that entirely novel ideas turned up. If you're the replication of a lost child, for example, are you loved for yourself or for someone else entirely? And imagine how terrible it would be to meet yourself and discover someone happier and more successful. Or, alternatively, imagine that genetics doesn't matter at all: "We've got 30 per cent the same genes as a lettuce," said one of the clones who turned up later. "I love the bit about lettuce, it makes me feel I belong." The same man, when asked to define his identity, touchingly offered a description couched entirely in terms of his feelings for other people. If you sat still and paid attention, I don't think you'll need telling just how good it was.