Cloud Nine is an inventive, surrealistic and entertaining look at sexual repression and sexual role conditioning.
The first act takes placei n Victorian Africa, suggeting the parallel between colonial and sexual repression. Clive, the whtie man, imposes his ideals on his family and the natives. Betty, his wife, is played by a man because she wants to be what men want her to be; and Joshua, their black servant, is played by a white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be.
The second act is set in London in 1979--in the changing sexuality of our own time. The characters, who have ages only twenty-five years, have become more real to themselves, men suffer as well as women, and our identities are warped by conforming to unnatural norms.
Biography
Caryl Churchill
"...the play offered an interesting commentary on prescribed notions of gender and sexuality..." -- Brown Daily Herald
"...Miss Churchill has found a theatrical method that is easily as dizzying as her theme. Not only does she examine a cornucopia of sexual permutations--from heterosexual adultery right up to bisexual incest-- but she does so with a wild array of dramatic styles and tricks...Miss Churchill, as you might gather is one deft writer." -- Frank Rich, The New York Times
"An examination of postcolonialism and gender issues doesn't sound like the kindling for a hot night on the town. But Brit playwright Caryl Churchill knows what she's doing when she uses these subjects as the launching pads for her absurd sense of humor and critical commentary. Her 1982 play Cloud Nine--a two act drama in which time and identity are not the rigid constructions we know them to be-is arguably the pinnacle of the playwright's career." -- Eye Weekly, Toronto
"Miss Churchill has a highly original imagination, and if what she's got to say is familiar it's funnier and fresher than the last time we heard it said . . . [Cloud Nine] is succinctly sassy, elegantly insulting, written with a quill pen that seems to have been deftly dipped in ice water." -- Walter Kerr, The New York Times
