Florian Zeller gets us lost in The Forest ”I'm listening. Do you always tell the truth?" Man in Black Angel Coulby as The Girlfriend and Paul McGann as Man 2…
Two British Asian sisters, both are at secondary school, one nearing the end and looking at university entrance to SOAS and the other, younger and hoping to buy a pet hamster. The elder girl Asha (Safiyya Ingar) is studying hard and getting involved in political history; the younger Bettina (Anoushka Chadha) is being bullied on the bus home from school. The playwright of Two Billion Beats, Sonali Bhattacharyya is a graduate of the Royal Court Young Writers Programme and is under contract currently to the Almeida Theatre and The Kiln.
Lennie James and Paapa Essiedu play the father Salter and three of his batch of cloned sons. The very act of cloning is in itself a challenge to the sense of self and individuality for these men. The first one we meet wants to know if he is the first but his father doesn't tell the truth. Salter, the father, talks about litigation and suing someone for the loss of identity. He implies that the cloning of "a number" was carried out without his consent.