Although Top Girls and A Number pop up relatively frequently, most of the great Caryl Churchill’s other works are simply too out there to revive with any regularity, and despite its renown her breakthrough play Cloud 9 hasn’t actually had a major London production in 30 years. This autumn, however, is the time, as the National Theatre’s leisurely series of Lyttelton revivals (Top Girls and A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire have both happened recently-ish) continues with Dominic Cooke’s take on Cloud 9. Set in both colonial Africa and ’70s England – with its characters only aging 25 years in a 125-year jump – the play is anything but straightforward but basically draws a line between sexual and colonial repression via its dizzying array of characters.
Although hardly racist, its depictions of racism and colonialism are somewhat informed by it being written in a very different era and it’ll be interesting to see if Churchill has updated it in any way.
Rebecca Humphries, Eloka Ivo, Tom Mothersdale, Charlotte Ritchie, Ellen Robertson, Stuart Thompson and Sam Troughton star.
