"
A Number confirms Chuchill's status as the first dramatist of the 21st century. On the face of it, it is human cloning... Like all Churchill's best plays, A Number deals with both the essentials and the extremities of human experience... The questions of this brilliant, harrowing play asks are almost unanswerable, which is why they must be asked" -
Sunday Times "Caryl Churchill's magnificent new play only last an hour but contains more drama, and more ideas, than most writers manage in a dozen full-length works." -
Daily Telegraph "Caryl Churchill's never stands still. After the dystopian nightmare of Far Away, she now comes up with a challenging new form of moral inquiry. And the key question she asks in this play is from what the essential core of self derives: from nature or nurture, genetic inheritance or environmental circumstance?" -
Guardian "Churchill's harrowing bioethics fable leaves us with a number of things to chew on." - Kris Vire,
Time Out Chicago "Stunning...
A Number, you see, is a gripping dramatic consideration of what happens to autonomous identity in a world where people can be cloned. The invaluable Ms. Churchill has not begun to stop surprising and unbalancing theatergoers. Since the 1970's this British dramatist has produced studies of a world quaking under constant siege in which style somehow always uniquely mirrors content. She has pondered mutations in gender (
Cloud Nine) and language (
Blue Heart), as well as the seismic disruptions of revolution (
Mad Forest), civil war (
Far Away) and environmental poisoning (
The Skriker). She has now moved on to ponder a threat to the very cornerstone of Western civilization since the Renaissance: the idea of human individuality, a subject she manages to probe in depth in a mere hour of spartan sentences and silences. It is hard to think of another contemporary playwright who combines such economy of means and breadth of imagination." – Ben Brantley,
New York Times