Theatre review: Cloud 9

Nowadays Caryl Churchill is gradually working towards the point where she can fit an entirely satisfying play into three minutes, but Cloud 9 comes from much earlier in her career, so it takes her three hours. Fortunately the play - which I saw over thirty years ago at university and which has been long overdue a London revival - holds up even at that extravagant running time. It's famous for two big high concepts which are deliberately designed to put the audience on the back foot: The first seems a bit more familiar now as casting against age, gender and race is pretty common, but Churchill wrote it into her script about a Victorian family at the height of the Empire. Somewhere in Africa, Clive (Sam Troughton) is the governor of a region in some turmoil, although he and his family prefer to allude fairly vaguely to the locals' uprising, hoping it won't come too close to home.

So they proceed to live their lives as a comedy of manners that increasingly veers off into a sex farce, as all the emotions they've suppressed explode out of them into chaos.

So Clive's wife Betty (Stuart Thompson) keeps trying to get away from the watchful eye of her mother Maud (Charlotte Ritchie) so she can continue her affair with family friend Harry (Tom Mothersdale,) while fending off the attentions of their children's governess (Rebecca Humphries.) Their son Edward (Ellen Robertson) keeps stealing his baby sister Victoria's doll - his father keeps trying to suppress any feminine behaviour from him and reward anything that can be construed as masculine.

Meanwhile Clive's manservant Joshua (Eloka Ivo) is trusted more than anyone, and resolutely sees himself as an Englishman who's black on the outside only. But as his patrician employer's soldiers take down the family he claims to have disowned, he more than anyone else at the house has to deal with the fact that their lives are a façade, and starts to question where his loyalties should lie.

Churchill's other big innovation is the time jump to the second act, in which the characters have aged by 25 years but time has moved on by 80, so they're deposited in a park in what was the present day when the play premiered, in 1979. Now centring on Victoria (Ritchie,) who was a baby in the first act, she's married to Martin (Mothersdale) but considering a relationship with her friend Lin (Humphries.)

Edward (Thompson) is in an on-off relationship with Gerry (Ivo) that started as a casual hookup but which he wants to become something more; he’s still not confident enough to be entirely out of the closet though. While they all spend the second half figuring out a complex polycule that'll look after Victoria's unseen son and Lin's tomboyish 4-year-old Cathy (Troughton,) even Betty (Robertson's version dressed by Samuel Wyer as 1970s Elizabeth II, in contrast to Thompson's Queen Victoria) starts to consider how different, and potentially exciting, her life might be.

So maybe it's the ambition and deliberate confusion that keeps an acknowledged modern classic from being revived more often, but Dominic Cooke's production gets an enthusiastic response that suggests it's worth the effort. Whether the same can be said for its big design conceit is a different story: Cooke has taken the way the story explodes its use of time and space between the acts to have Miriam Buether’s set do the same, the ornate picture frame surrounding the African landscape collapsing over the interval, taking out the front two rows of the Stalls in the process, so some of the audience join the cast onstage for the finale when the rubble becomes a London park and playground.

It’s undoubtedly an impressive visual, but whether it actually works as a coup de théâtre is a different story since it requires an extended interval with the entire audience having to leave the auditorium. Everyone having to trudge back in and find their seats again after over half an hour in the bar means the wow factor of the entire set seeming to have exploded in the meantime doesn’t really land, and I’m not convinced it’s worth the trade-off with an extra-late finish time for a play that, for all that it more than stands the test of time, does succumb to a bit of Multiple Ending Syndrome.

Overall though Cloud 9 does live up to how much I remember liking it three decades ago, although some of the casual references to paedophilia and incest in the story are probably getting a slightly different kind of shocked reaction than they once did. But even if it’s been so influential that some of its techniques have become common tropes, they’re still executed freshly enough, with a cast absolutely committing to their rotating roles, that the audience was audibly excited, amused and yes, sometimes in ways the playwright probably always intended, a bit confused.

Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill is booking until the 13th of January at the National Theatre’s Lyttelton.

Running time: 3 hours including interval.

Photo credit: Johan Persson.