A Note from the Dramaturg
Cloud 9 premiered in 1979, solidifying Caryl Churchill’s reputation as a sly master of theatrical possibility and an eloquent anthropologist of human desire. Developed with the Joint Stock Theatre Company, Cloud 9 is a serious comedy about the complexities of power, gender, and desire, one that charts the pleasures and anxiety their confusion creates.
The first act is set in British colonial Africa, where Empire administrator and family patriarch Clive tries to uphold the order of family and colony, while his son plays with dolls, his wife might be yearning for his best friend (who may harbor an unspeakable longing of his own), and the local tribes’ “squabbles” may need to be reckoned with. Much of the delight of this act, which runs on the charge of erotic desire and confusion, is in the dissonance between the image of propriety that the family projects and the chaos that image covers. Churchill underscores the folly of her Victorians’ certainty about their ability to corral their bodies and desires by casting Clive’s wife Betty with a male actor and Clive’s African servant Joshua with a white one. In contrast, Clive’s doll-loving son Edward is played by an adult female, as Edward struggles to live up to his father’s image of him.
Cloud 9’s contrapuntal act structure balances the control, order, and misery of colonists in Victorian-era Africa with the openness, uncertainties, and anxieties of late-70s “liberated” London. Act Two plunges its characters (for whom it is only 25 years later) into the ambiguities of then-contemporary 1979 London, as Betty and her children begin to ask how they will live their lives in a world with more options and less surety. Characters are played by different actors in the second act; some never reappear. The bodies of characters and the actors who play them are more closely aligned (although Churchill has surprises for her audience throughout). In her exploration of a culture beset by change, Churchill shows a mother and her adult children looking for a sense of self-completeness that may ultimately be utopian, but is powerful nonetheless in its promise of an identity that feels like freedom, wholly integrated inside and out.
That, at its core, is what draws Studio to a play written nearly forty years ago. Although hairstyles and hemlines have shifted, Cloud 9 intersects today with a culture in a time of change, where predominant cultural narratives are shifting to reflect a wider set of experiences. People still emerge from their childhoods to a world for which they were not raised. Liberation feels, at best, provisional. While her comedy is grounded in the manners of its time, Churchill’s insights from decades past still offer insights into the confusion and exhilaration of a changed and changing world.
— Adrien-Alice Hansel