Like everyone else, I share about 30% of my genes with the lettuce. Generally I suppress the urge to be smothered in salad cream, and the fact I share a high proportion of my genes with green leaves doesn't make me think that I resemble a lettuce. I am confident that I am entirely unlettuce-like.
Actually, I think I'm a pretty unique human being. Not like any other person, even though I share 99% of my genes with the rest of the human race.
A minute ago, Bernard thought just like me. He thought that he was the only son of his father, Salter. But at the start of Caryl Churchill's exhilaratingly knotty play he has just discovered that not only is he not his father's son, he is a clone. And he is not alone, he is one of "a number", maybe more than 20 people, who were copied from Salter's only son - also called Bernard - who Salter claims was killed in a car crash.
Despite the searchlight that sweeps the stage, truth often proves to be as shifting as identity in Churchill's play. In fact cloning, and what is it that makes you you and me me, are only side issues in this punchy piece. Perhaps it is the fact that father and son(s) are here being played by real-life father and son Timothy and Samuel West, but Churchill's play seems concerned less with the ethics of scientific advances and more with the responsibilities of parenting.
Our children, she suggests, are what we make them, and she voices what every parent at some time thinks: how nice it would be to go back to the blank slate of babyhood and do it differently.
What are children, after all, other than our own wildly egotistical experiment, our own personal crucible? If scientists should take responsibility for their actions, then so should we. Churchill's play is as slippery as an alley cat and sometimes it's hard to keep hold of its teasing tail, but her ruptured dialogue and short urgent scenes give immediacy to lives and lies that start to unravel. Samuel West gives compelling and nuanced performances as the anxious younger Bernard and the damaged elder one, and offers a third version of reality as the happily married teacher.
Timothy West is excellent too as the evasive Salter, a man who sometimes seems like a granite wall blocking everything out and at others like a bewildered walrus blinking into the abyss.
· Until November 11. Box office: 0114 2496000
