Theatre reviews: A Number | All of Me
A Number, Howden Park Centre, Livingston ****
All Of Me, Tron Theatre, Glasgow ****
A man's life is derailed by disaster. His wife dies, he takes to drink, he cannot care for his young son, who becomes disturbed and is taken into care. In recovery, he makes an extreme decision to pay a genetic scientist to create an exact clone of his once-perfect child, and happily raises him; only to discover, almost 30 years on, that the scientist has broken their deal, in ways that have horrifying ramifications.
This is the situation that underpins Caryl Churchill’s superb 2002 play A Number, an immensely spare and subtle hour-long exploration of parenthood and identity that never fails to fascinate audiences, not least through its sense of a society brought by advancing science to the brink of profound change in our sense of what it means to be human. This is the play artistic director Lyn McAndrew has chosen for Rapture Theatre’s first lunchtime tour of 2022, visiting venues across Scotland for an hour of powerful theatre accompanied by a snack lunch beforehand, and coffee and a chat afterwards; and if the format was a huge success in pre-pandemic times, before the sad death of McAndrew’s husband and partner Michael Emans, it now seems like an ideal gentle path back into theatre-going for those still nervous after two years of lockdowns.
Advertisement
Hide AdIn McAndrew’s tightly-focussed production – with a powerful urban soundscape in the breaks between scenes – Robin Kingsland delivers a memorably strong and complex performance as the father, Salter, a character both sympathetic and repellent in his efforts to account for his decision, and to handle its terrible aftermath. And Paul Albertson plays three of his identical sons with such energy and focus that despite the brevity of the play, his performance seems less like a technical exercise in outlining different personalities, and more like short, searing glimpses into two lives utterly distorted and wrecked by Salter’s decision; and another still able to revel in the miracle of being alive, despite everything.
If A Number offers an example of a great playwright nursing an idea until she reaches exactly the right distance from and angle on it, Caroline Horton’s All Of Me – winner of the 2019 Edinburgh Fringe Award for a show about mental health issues, and this week briefly at the Tron, as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts Festival – belongs to that school of self-deprecating 21st century theatre which rejects all that, and plunges straight into the autobiographical badlands of life for 21st century millennials, whose struggles with despair, depression and anxiety hardly seem surprising given the state of the world they have inherited.
Horton therefore begins her 70-minute show with a long apology for its messiness, and its intensely personal quality, before launching into what is in fact a highly-wrought and extremely complex journey into the underworld of mental distress, partly inspired by the myth of Persephone, who was stolen away by Hades as a young girl, and had to live with him in the underworld for half of every year. In Horton’s show, the journey involves the quest for a lost sister; and its most striking feature is its extraordinary vocal soundscape of shifting voices and recorded and reverberated vocal material, mostly created live by Horton during the performance. Towards the end, the story takes flight through Horton’s exquisite singing voice in almost operatic terms.
A Number is on tour until 5 June, with dates in Greenock, Peebles, Stirling, Inverness, East Kilbride, Glenrothes, Motherwell, Musselburgh and Dunoon. All Of Me, run completed.