"Cloud Nine". Pilch. Review by Victoria Tayler

Hysterical, hypochondriacal posh people just never get old. Postbox Production’s version of Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill takes absurdity by the face and makes out with it. It is, as my partner called it, ‘tonal whiplash.’ In one scene, the play is bawdy, riotous, in the next, disturbing, overly revelatory, uncomfortable to look at. Queer themes are played to their absolute ends: in contrast to a noted trend in Peter’s recent review of I Am a Camera there’s no reluctance regarding open displays of carnal sexuality here. The result is something riveting, expert, surprising. I laugh and wonder if I am supposed to be having a good time.

How to explain Cloud Nine? Act one follows the absurdly inhibited lives of a Victorian colonial family settled in Africa. Unrest and resistance to imperial rule makes the outside world a dangerous place for our characters, who remain inside of the house where their restrictive conventions around gender and sexuality cause a societal collapse in miniature. Affairs sprout, heteronormativity breaks down, the family falls apart, taking with it Britishness, empire, ‘the normal,’ and so on.

Churchill is an eccentric playwright, to say the least, her stage directions no less so. Joshua, a canonically black character and a servant to the colonial family, is played by a white actor, a feature of Churchill’s commentary on the internalisations of the many ‘isms’ and colonial normativity. Betty, the repressed colonial wife, is played by a man, reflecting her rejection of her own sex and desire to become the perfect wife-object of her husband’s and community’s desires. And a woman plays Edward, the young gay son and victim of sexual abuse who acts as one of the few consistent characters across the play.

The result is something dark but weirdly digestible, understandable. Blatant discussions about racism, sexism, and colonialism lose their power to instinctively trigger and can instead act as exploratory ventures into the complex internal lives of our characters. Our cast delivers on this with expertise. Vita Hamilton’s portrayal of the young Edward is moving, disorientating, experienced anew. We take with us no preconceptions and she leads us somewhere real and bleak.

The team also makes new and exciting decisions here, expanding on Churchill’s experimental race and gender bending. Clive, the colonial administrator and head of the household who talks gravely of his imperial duty to ‘civilise the natives,’ is played (and played so damn well) by Obum Onwu, a black actor. The decision evokes something of Franz Fanon in its place, expanding on and elevating some of the critical themes in Churchill’s work. The jungle adventurer/closet gay man/pedophilic uncle Harry Bagley is also changed to be played by a woman. The impact of this on me was less effectual, I think because, whilst Rachel Wadie was terrifyingly on the mark in places, her tendency to pull out the pantomimic ‘male mogging’ facial expressions slightly took me out of the drama and into the slapstick. 

Which leads us into the question I’ve been asking myself. Is it possible for a performance to be too carnivalesque? The Guardian’s review of the National Theatre’s version praises that show for delivering on those comedic elements ‘without exploding into farce or pantomime’ which makes me think that it can. Xander Lewis’ performance of Betty is near perfect for me, save for a few moments of parodic, crotch-thrusting sexual chemistry between Betty and Harry. Georgie Cotes as Ellen, the governess, is almost perfect for me, but teeters a bit too far into wailing emotional despair territory for my cold critic’s heart. We risk losing some of the depth to the comedy, a very seductive loss, because this cast is hilarious.

Some gravity is won back in the second half. Did I say Cotes was near perfect in the first half? Well in act two she completely spoils us, and I have to force myself to watch the other cast members as well. She’s bang-on in her depiction of Lin, a lesbian single mother raising her rather difficult five-year old daughter (hilariously played, as is conventional, by the same actor who plays the colonial head of household Clive) and imperfectly navigating a 1979 (imagined and real) culture of chosen families and queer relationships. There is also incest in this play, but somehow they’ll make you forget about that.

Outside of the Cotes though, the second half doesn’t quite land for me in the way the first half did, falling on me like a cartoon anvil. I think the decision to go so riotous at the start removes some of the options for gravity at the end. A large part of the play’s resolution operates around (stay with me) the premise that Lin, her partner Victoria, and Victoria’s brother (and partner) Edward have accidentally summoned forth spirits from their family’s colonial past. Well, some characters are from the colonial past, and others (Edward, Betty, and Victoria) are the same characters from the colonial past, inexplicably forwarded 200 years into the future, only having aged by two decades or so.

The insane set up of those parts allows for an emotional confrontation between the character’s previous selves, struggling as they were with the internalisation of patriarchy, homophobia, etc, and their new selves, trying to make sense of a more permissive seventies culture that gives them the household as a safe space for their more kaleidoscopic identities. Betty, now a woman in her forties (Vita Hamilton, back in the familiar territory of her typecast, but she does do it well) confronts both her mother (glorious performance by Annie Kendall, by the way) and her past self, embracing the young Betty as the final act of the play. But it feels a little sudden to me, the emotional carnage of the first act not quite soothed by the reconciliations of the second. The hug just doesn’t quite cut it.

Gosh, I have to stop going on, but there’s so much more to say. The team rejuggles the traditional cast double acts (such as the older Betty being played by the actress who previously played her husband’s mistress) in ways that are so intriguing and conjure up new ways of thinking about generational trauma, the marks our experiences leave on our identities. Older Edward, traditionally paired with Clive, is now played by the young Betty, which further throws off associations of his identity slowly ‘heternormalising’ despite him ending up living with a woman (plural queer identities, woo!). 

But I’ll force myself to stop there. No amount of analysing will fully render it. You MUST go watch it!