An unusual fusion of postmodernism and identity politics, Victorian manners and me-decade mores, Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine surveys and shatters sex and imperialism. At the Atlantic, this 1979 play has been given a cool and dispassionate revival, which can feel both immediate and outmoded.
The director James Macdonald is a longtime interpreter of Churchill’s work. He organises this play, as he has several others, with the audience seated on risers overlooking a circular stage – part gladiatorial arena, part conversation pit. (The efficient if uncomfortable set is by Dane Laffrey, the superb lights by Scott Zielinksi.) In the first act, spectators observe an English family stationed in equatorial Africa in the Victorian age. The mother, Betty, is played by a man; the young son, Edward, by a woman, the better to emphasize the dubious strictures of gender. “I am a man’s creation as you see,” says Betty. In this world, the bodies of women and children are colonised, too.
The second act takes place a century later, in 1970s England, though the characters are only a generation older. Greater permissiveness dominates, though people still feel confused by the roles they ought to play, sexually and culturally. They are experimenting, trying out new familial and erotic structures, but they remain repressed by social expectations and power relations. As one character says, “You can’t separate fucking and economics.”
Cloud Nine has stayed mostly trenchant about the constraints of gender – for men as well as for women. But its profound lack of interest in exploring racial oppression, which is pretty inextricable from any discussion of colonialism, dates it, a flaw Macdonald’s production makes no attempt to remedy.
In Cloud Nine there is only one character of colour, an African servant named Joshua who has entirely adopted the politics of his masters. He is played by a white actor, which makes sense in Churchill’s topsy-turvy world. Yet there isn’t any compelling reason why all the other roles in this non-realist work have to be played by white actors, too. This isn’t to say that the actors aren’t good. They are, but a more diverse cast would ease this disparity.
As to the play’s more manifest concerns, it seems odd that a work so focused on the politics of desire should remain so sexless. This is somewhat Churchill’s doing. A fan of the distancing device, she employs a medley of Brecht’s greatest hits. But surely some sort of passion, craving, longing should transcend this alienation. No such luck. Macdonald’s resolutely unerotic tone favours knowing mockery and chilly scrutiny. Sex – gay, straight, polymorphously perverse – is treated as a joke. Sometimes a good one, more often a bad one, rarely very funny. This would seem contrary to a script that concludes with a speech arguing for sexuality as a means of self-definition.
It can’t be all about the economics.
