Theatre has begun to engage with science, as Caryl Churchill's play about cloning at the Peacock, and an Irish playwriting competition, demonstrate, writes Sara Keating
Drama throughout the ages has been defined by conflict and catharsis; characters fight against the forces that threaten them or shape their lives, and an audience is vicariously purged of their fears. For the ancient Greeks, it was the gods that forced the limits of existence and expression upon humanity, and the struggles of Oedipus, Medea and Electra taught spectators that the individual was an expendable entity in the face of the greater forces of Fate. For Elizabethan theatre-goers, it was power that threatened civilisation, and the rise and fall of Shakespeare's kings proved a valuable example to noblemen in the gallery and servants in the stalls that "conscience with injustice is corrupted" - and then punished.
In 20th-century drama, the individual appeared to pose the greatest threat to himself, and decades of international conflict thrust questions about personal responsibility in the age of capitalism to the forefront of the artist's imagination. Samuel Beckett and the existential post-modernists internalised the debate, staging the conflict of consciousness as the only debate with any meaning, the only vehicle for change. Meanwhile, Arthur Miller's Willy Loman spoke on behalf of the realists when he questioned the justice of a world "where you end up worth more dead than alive". Now, in the 21st century, it seems that science is the force that will shape our future. As medical developments have extended our life-spans, so continued experimentation promises to enhance the experience of living.
Pre-natal genetic screening promises to eradicate disability and stop diseases in their tracks. An increased concern with "quality of life" has given us greater freedom to choose how we live or how we die. Liberal legislation laws have questioned the rights of an individual to make those choices on another living being's behalf. As IVF and embryonic stem-cell research force us to question our assumptions about the exact point of the beginning of life, so innovations such as bio-banking allow us to consider an alternative to death. If science is the architect of our future, man is now his own God.
The ethical implications of a life where human frailty might be fixed before it even manifests itself and natural evolution might be overtaken by eugenics have provoked controversy in disciplines as diverse as biology, medicine, cybernetics, politics, law, philosophy, and theology. If drama has traditionally engaged with the conflicts between human beings and the world around them, then drama that is created in the century where science threatens the very nature of what it is to be a human being will provide an important forum in which these issues might be debated.
Gavin Kostick, literary manager with Fishamble Theatre Company, is one of the judges in a playwriting competition devoted to exploring these issues, which is being sponsored by the Irish Council for Bioethics. Having just begun to sift through some of the 121 entries that the competition received, Kostick believes that theatre will play an important role in opening up public debate about the sensitive ethical implications of current scientific and medical developments.
"What the competition is designed to foster," he says, "is theatre coming from research and science-based origins - theatre rooted in actual research, in real-life issues. But ultimately the research is directed towards a live performance that has ability to make you engage. Theatre of its nature has the ability to make people engage with reality as lived and the forces underpinning it; because you are in a room with people, on stage, who are making choices that you can feel in a human and intense way."
KOSTICK BELIEVES THAT the theatre can accommodate "a variety of approaches to bioethical issues that will yield different types of plays. There's the balanced argument play, where a difficult decision has to be made, and in the course of the play characters' positions shift and change until a particular option is chosen. However, I don't feel, myself, as a reader, a liberal urge to balance everything off.
"For example, I wouldn't be averse to something polemical; something that says blatantly 'this is wrong' - as long as it's quality drama. But the play that gets chosen in the end could well be a traditional play set in a kitchen, with a couple drinking tea and deciding whether to go to India to have IVF treatment. It has to be science-based, certainly, but doesn't necessarily have to feature lab technicians in white coats saying that we've created a monster."
Caryl Churchill's play A Number, which opens at The Peacock Theatre on Friday, is a fine example of a dramatic work that deals with issues with bioethical implications in a thought-provoking way. In basic scientific terms, it is a play about cloning, but it is more deeply engaged with the idea of human responsibility in the age of science. Written in 2002, amidst the controversy of Dolly the cloned sheep, A Number tells the story of a father, Salter, who clones his son. In a sparse and compelling five scenes, the play enacts the repercussions of his decision.
AS ANNABELLE COMYN, director of the forthcoming production of the play, insists, the play "is set in the immediate future. It is like a nightmare scenario of what would happen if we use science to choose the type of children that we have. Salter, the father, uses science to create an ideal vision for what he wants from life: the perfect son. He alters the future to suit his own specifications, but it is not for the benefit of his son, or the greater world of humankind. It is a vanity project; by determining the future he can create a new self."
A Number questions the bioethical implications of cloning human beings, but it also questions our assumptions about cloning. It provides an interesting sub-text that engages with the debate about the role of genetic material in the development of human personality, ie the "nature versus nurture" argument. In A Number we meet three of Salter's sons: his original son, Bernard, the original clone, also named Bernard, and Michael, one of the 19 other versions of his son. However, as Comyn explains, each son is thoroughly individual.
"What you have in the play is two sons, the Bernards, who have been damaged by their father's actions. Salter wants to find something wrong with Michael too, so that he can let himself off the hook, so that he can say it was genetics that determined their lives, that damaged them, not how he brought them up. Salter feels cheated when he is reminded that his second son is just a copy. He believes that the clones undermine his perfect son, Bernard, the original clone. He says, "they've damaged your uniqueness, weakened your identity." But when he meets Michael he is forced to acknowledge the awful truth that it was he who damaged these people. As Michael says, it is the people in our lives who make us what we are; other people give us value by giving us their love."
The challenges of producing clones on stage also go some way towards addressing our assumptions about cloning. A single actor, Stuart Graham, plays the two Bernards and Michael, but, as Comyn elaborates, the authenticity of physical detail doesn't make the task of representation any easier: "We haven't come from the point of view of trying to make the characters different - by changing their hair or something really obvious like that. We've more been concentrating on playing these characters for who they are, finding where each one holds themselves, where they're rooted, because that is different for each character.
"Hopefully that will make it clear enough for the audience, and they can focus in on the lesson in the play: if you do not face up to your actions, take responsibility for who you are, for what you have done, the consequences will come back to haunt you."
As the Greeks used drama to purge their anxieties about their relationship to the gods, and the Elizabethans used the theatre to expunge their concerns about prevailing social hierarchies, so A Number enacts the potential results that the 21st-century desire to tinker with nature might imprint upon the future of the world. Ultimately the decisions might be made in laboratories far from our view, but the repercussions will surely play out in the theatre over the coming years as the consequences begin to manifest themselves in our lives.
The playwriting competition being run by the Irish Council for Bioethics has closed, but more information on the work of the council is available on www.bioethics.ie
A Number opens on Friday at the Peacock Theatre and runs until March 3rd
