(Susan Croft’s article appeared in the Guardian, 11/4; Photo: Miriam Margolyes (Maud), Antony Sher (Clive), Julie Covington (Edward) and William Hoyland (Harry Bagley) in Cloud 9 at the Royal Court, London, in 1979. It was previously performed in Dartington. Photograph: Donald Cooper/Alamy.)
Premiering in 1979, this liberating production questioned gender and sexuality, with Antony Sher playing an upright father and a bearded five-year-old girl
In 1979, I was at Dartington College of Arts in Devon. They had a season of alternative theatre each year and I was agog. It was so accessible and political and engaged in feminism and all the changes that were happening at that time. There weren’t very many female writers getting produced then. (Even now, women have only written 25% or so of the plays on stages – in a good year.) I went to Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 with a friend. We had missed that first wave of the women’s liberation movement, 10 years or so before. But we were kind of finding our way; women were on the up and up and everything was being questioned.
In the first half of the play, Clive is a Victorian paterfamilias in Africa. He’s a colonial administrator dealing with “the natives” and their uprisings. He’s got a childlike wife who he protects but she is played by a man. And then there is a son – played by a woman – who is constantly put down by his parents because he’s not manly enough and wants to play with his sister’s doll.
In the second half, it’s 1979 – 25 years later – with the same characters, but all played by different actors. Antony Sher played Clive, the upright manly father, in the first half; in the second he was Cathy, a bearded five-year-old girl. At one point, Cathy swung into the set chanting the sort of inappropriate little rhymes that kids come out with. You learn this stuff as a child but it was the first time I’d heard anything like that on a stage.
