Cloud 9 @ Capitol Theatre, Manchester
A lovely feminist
(Reviewed Thursday May 21, 2009)
Not to sound like a Victorian matriarch, but I do so find Cloud Nine a wholly objectionable play. I should adore it. It is, in principle, the kind of politically and theatrically radical piece that I should want to hug until its clever little feminist conceits fall right off. So why so churlish? Well, it just doesn’t quite work does it? Churchill’s instructions for cross-casting (male as female/ white as black/ adult male as female child) are ideologically brilliant yet in performance they fall flat- like an undercooked, anti-patriarchal soufflé.
Gabriel Gawin’s recent revival (part of Manchester Metropolitan’s graduate showcase) did little to exorcise my inner schoolmarm. It’s easy to feel lost in this play, which sprawls itself before you spanning Colonial-era Africa and 1979 London, and this sensation isn’t aided by the vast black-box space of the Capitol Theatre. Pale wooden shutter-blinds, slats out of place, hang jauntily from the ceiling, sharing airspace with a grey-scale Union Jack flag and several antique birdcages. I’ll admit I didn’t get the metaphor.
And metaphors are a problem in this play. In the first half Betty, the wife of tyrannical patriarch Clive, is played by a man. We must (must!) therefore infer that every thought in Betty’s pretty little head is enforced by a man. We must consider how Betty is forced into a constricting gender role despite being equal to a man (heck, she IS a man!). Yet Gawin’s Betty (Ryan Cerenko) is more pantomime dame than anything else. Cerenko camps it up royally, squealing and swooning all over the shop (presumably for feminists everywhere…)
It is all very enjoyable, but what about when the irony falls away? Are we supposed to feel sorry for Betty Twankey when she describes the extent of her sexual participation as ‘just keeping still’? Can we possibly reflect upon the inequality of the sexes (bygone and enduring) when Betty too easily elicits laughter?
Gawin’s staging of the second half is also problematic. Written for a park in the ’70s, Gawin is meticulous in a recreation of the period. Yet, dressing up the speeches of this second act in achingly retro clothing confines the emerging tensions safely to 1979. And I resent any implication that we are somehow post-feminist.
I am, of course, being grossly unfair to lay all of this at Gawin’s door. Churchill’s feminist figures in the second act have not aged well. One character is a lesbian who declares she hates men (at least wardrobe had the sense not to put her in dungarees is all I can say). A sexually frustrated, married woman for whom the answer is not economic equality but a lesbian lover. An effeminate gay man who announces ‘I think I’m a lesbian’. Must we all be lesbians, Caryl?
This leads me to my final big fat problem. It stems from my desire for positive representations in a play that is so politically charged. The second act of the play naively leaves its colonial past in, well, the past rather than address its legacy. The initial casting of a female actor as Edward sanitizes any homosexual encounters. The women in act two seek salvation in sexuality.
Yes, Churchill wrote the script, but nearly 30 years since its debut performance I wished for more from a revival. I want a production that makes the audience ask why, three decades on, we haven’t yet found the answers to Churchill’s questions. Or is that more Cloud Cuckooland than Cloud Nine?
