Cloud 9

Unemployment seems to be infectious. With every passing day, it is getting harder and harder to remember the last actors to have played James Bond and Doctor Who and, by the end of this week, there will likely be vacancies for the positions of Manchester United head coach and NVidia CEO too. There will be no shortage of strong candidates for any of those but the headhunters can strike Dominic Cooke off the list as he is due to become the latest Artistic Director of North London’s Almeida.

Before he dusts off his “first day in the office” clothes, though, he has his take on Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 to deliver on the South Bank. This study of British attitudes operates in two very different eras: before the interval, the cast portray an extended colonial family in an unnamed African country; after, they play characters living in 1979 London.

The play debuted a few weeks before Margaret Thatcher assumed her own new position as Prime Minister and, almost fifty years on, there are inevitably parts that haven’t dated well. Its title comes from a workshop Churchill organised with the original actors: each one told the group their sexual history and one said “now we have sex sometimes as much as twice a week and I’m on Cloud 9.”

Quite whether the play itself warrants such ecstasy these days is debatable. The first act has the once-edgy humour and absurdist larks beloved by Not The Nine O’Clock News and Monty Python while Benny Hill fans would have lapped up its cavalcade of sexual shenanigans. The more self-reflective second act uses ghostly visual echoes of past character iterations to bridge the century-long jump (which is 25 years for the characters) without losing narrative momentum.

The actors tackle the material with gusto. Sam Troughton — grandson of the second Doctor Who Patrick Troughton — has, perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest success when it comes to crossing space and time in different guises. In Victorian-era Africa, he plays the stiff-lipped Victorian patriarch Clive who uses his tongue for more than just giving orders; in twentieth-century London, he is the pouting and mischievous toddler Cathy who is never more than one ice-cream away from a complete meltdown.

Rebecca Humphries also gets to demonstrate an impressive range, playing two diverse roles before the interval (repressed Irish governess Ellen and the rather more sexually liberated Mrs Saunders) before re-appearing practically unrecognisable as lesbian single mother Lin. Making her NT debut is Charlotte Ritchie (Ghosts) who switches from upright matriarch Maud to an older Victoria chained to Tom Mothersdale who plays her controlling partner Martin and (earlier) the gung-ho explorer Harry Bagley.

The staging is Cooke’s most notable brainwave. During a lengthy break in which the stalls audience is turfed out into the lobby, the jungle setting is whisked away, a sheet is placed over the entire stage and the first few front rows and a small pile of girders are placed in the middle of the space. Those who were seated there are now shuffled to the back of the stage. If this is Cooke’s way of visually concocting a connection between modern times and the Seventies, it underwhelms: the displaced punters behind the actors look awkwardly onto the hall either leaning on or sitting on boxes, as if waiting for their other half to finish their shopping at Ikea.

Despite the yawning gap in cultural differences, this is still a work that entertains and stirs. The original text’s comic blasts against class can now be viewed through the lens of privilege while the spiralling plot never loses focus. Even if the impact of chief points of provocation — not least the pederasty, the sexual politics, and the cross-gender casting — have been blunted by time, in 2026 Cloud 9 still warrants its well-regarded position in Churchill’s repertoire.

Cloud 9 continues until 13 January.


Photo credit: Johan Persson