RITA DI SANTO draws attention to a new film that features Ken Loach and Jeremy Corbyn, and their personal experience of media misrepresentation
The perils of carrying our deficiencies into any ‘brave new world’
OUT OF SYNC: Lennie James as Salter the father and Paapa Essiedu as one of the three sons
[Manuel Harlan]
JULIA TOPPIN recommends Patti Smith’s eloquent memoir that wrestles with the beauty and sorrow of a lifetime
MARJORIE MAYO welcomes an account of family life after Oscar Wilde, a cathartic exercise, written by his grandson
KEN COCKBURN guides us through a survey of Chekov’s early short fiction, and the groundwork it laid for his later masterpieces
ANDY HEDGECOCK revels in a hugely enjoyable but deadly serious examination of the 1930s, that is an indictment of our own era
The bard distills our hellish times into fiery words
A Number
Old Vic
CLONING has often been thought a subject best left for sci-fi, but at the turn of the 21st century — when Caryl Churchill’s play A Number was first staged — the prospect of humans being cloned was raised after a Finnish-Dorset sheep named Dolly became the first mammal to be cloned from an adult cell.
Now 20 years later, and the politics of our DNA has taken centre stage again with companies like 23andMe offering a full breakdown of your genetic makeup from a saliva sample. As if Silicon Valley doesn’t have enough of our data.
But if A Number is on one level a warning sign about the drawbacks of human cloning, it is many other things beside. It’s also a timeless analysis of nature vs nurture, and the complex relationship between a father and son.
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