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Time makes Cloud a washout!
CLOUD NINE
ALMEIDA
by Simon Wroe
NO ONE seems more aware of the passage of time and its effect on public opinion as Caryl Churchill, the writer of Cloud Nine: a play exploring the paradigm shift in sexual politics between 19th-century colonial Africa and 1970s London.
So it is a shame then, to see how much Churchill’s 1979 play has palled in the face of advancing years.
A grotesque, hilarious array of Victorian clichés gather on Peter McKintosh’s sparse, Savannah porch stage for the first half.
The men are gurning, johdpur-clad imperialists, the women useless, austere creatures in
constant deferment to the wisdom and wishes of the men-folk.
Churchill subverts gender to good effect; wife Betty is played by a man and Edward, the doll-coveting son encouraged to be more manly, played by a woman. Bo Poraj’s lantern jaw complements his witty portrayal of Betty, while Nichola Walker is suitably stiff as her troubled son.
Instead of a po-faced commentary on the place of women and the white, male hegemony, the pomp and circumstance of the empire and its stumbling servants is played for laughs. When the dashing explorer and serial sodomite Harry Bagley (Tobias Menzies, looking the spit of a short-sighted greyhound) arrives, events descend into gleeful, what-the-butler-saw farce.
“Remember, Harry, Rome fell,” is the advice of boorish patriarch Clive (James Fleet).
“It is a disease more dangerous than
diphtheria,” Harry admits.
Unfortunately, there is a second half. Pushing the times on by a century, but ageing her characters by only 20 years, Churchill casts the changing views on sex and gender in stark relief to their forebears. Edward (now played by male actor Bo Poraj) is a gardener, still not publicly “out” but living with his gay lover.
His sister (Joanna Scanlan) is dabbling with bisexuality, while their recently divorced mother Betty (now Nicola Walker) experiments with masturbation.
The characters’ talk oscillates between casual cottaging and f***king, while others say things like “aren’t you just collaborating with sexist consumerism?” with a straight face.
This might have sounded fresh and daring in the late 1970s (though whether it ever sounded good is unlikely), but now it rings hollow.
The problem with polemics is their shelf life. A controversial idea today is an advert tomorrow.
Churchill’s play raises some interesting questions, but it makes its boldest statement – about the transience of social values and how definition constrains – unwittingly.
Until December 8
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