“I’m bad, bad, bad!” says a woebegone Betty, the wife of a Victorian-era colonial administrator, while confessing to an adulterous infatuation in “Cloud 9,” Caryl Churchill’s chaotic satire of sexual mores. But if the play, which announced its author as one of the foremost feminist playwrights of the 1980s, has a message, it’s that having desires is not the same as being wicked.
“Cloud 9” is relentlessly playful, making a mockery not just of patriarchy, but of stagecraft itself: Genders are swapped, the young play the old and vice versa, and one character, a little girl, is represented onstage by a doll. When the timeline jumps forward almost a century, Betty has aged a mere 25 years and is played by a different actor. Confusion reigns.
But in a London revival of “Cloud 9,” directed by Dominic Cooke and running at the National Theater through Jan. 13, this chaos serves as an allegory about the exuberance of self-discovery. A story that begins as a frivolous caper gradually crystallizes into a thoughtful meditation on sexual freedom.
Sam Troughton delivers a fine comic turn as Betty’s husband, Clive, an embattled 19th-century patriarch whose kingly existence in an African colonial outpost is thrown into turmoil by a generalized outbreak of horniness. Betty (Stuart Thompson) fancies Clive’s best pal, Harry (Tom Mothersdale), a swashbuckling, oversexed explorer. Alarmingly, Harry has been sexually involved with the couple’s 9-year-old son, Edward (Ellen Robertson), who is in love with him.
Clive himself is trying to bed a local widow, Mrs. Saunders (Rebecca Humphries), and at one point deliberately spills champagne on himself to cover up an incriminating stain on his crotch. To save Harry’s soul, Clive bullies him into marrying Edward’s governess, Ellen (Humphries again), who is in turn hopelessly infatuated with Betty.
Everybody loses in this spirited old-school farce as irrepressible desire overpowers mannered, stiff-upper-lip Englishness, and 21st-century theatergoers might, at times, wonder if there is something to be said for uptightness after all.
Troughton re-emerges for Act Two sporting tights and Mary-Janes, playing 5-year-old Cathy, the charmingly headstrong daughter of Lin, a lesbian single mother (Humphries yet again). We’re now in late-1970s Britain, where an assortment of sexually fluid youngsters are figuring themselves out in a series of choppy vignettes.
An older Edward (now played by Thompson) wonders if he might be a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. A young woman in an unsatisfying heterosexual relationship dabbles in bisexuality. There’s an orgy, a ghostly visitation and even a hint of incest.
Amid all this, we are reacquainted with Betty (now played by Robertson), who has left her husband and struck out on her own. Her journey, which forms the play’s through-line, provides its one element of real emotional sincerity as Robertson, looking like a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II with her skirt suit and handbag combo, tenderly evokes a tentative sexual autonomy emerging after a lifetime of prim repression.
When she describes masturbating for the first time in many years, Betty is talking about more than just a sex act: “I felt myself gathering together, more and more.”
“Cloud 9” was an Off Broadway hit from 1981 to 1983. Yet its fragmented narrative form still feels fresh and is given a literal visual expression in this production: A huge picture frame that surrounds the stage in Act One is seen smashed to bits in Act Two, its pieces strewed across the stage like Ancient Greek ruins. (Set design is by Miriam Beuther.)
In some respects, though, the play feels very much of its time — for example, a recurring preoccupation with toys and gender. The young Edward enjoys playing with a doll and is taunted for his effeminacy, while Cathy’s mother lets her play with a pellet gun, in pointed defiance of gender expectations. That this commentary on the nature of play feels trite in 2026 is a testament to the normalization of feminist critiques over the past half-century: What was once a novel sociological insight has become common sense.
The play’s somewhat casual — at times almost blithe — treatment of pederasty and incest also sits uneasily in today’s cultural climate, which is less indulgent of transgression for its own sake.
Yet on occasion, this register achieves results that more sensitive treatments might not. When young Edward stroppily declares, “I wish the others would all be killed” to facilitate his romance with the older man, the line has a terrible poignancy — these are the words of a groomed child — but gets a big laugh nonetheless. It’s the turn of phrase, as much as the futility of the sentiment and Robertson’s delivery, that does it. Far from trivializing Edward’s plight, it heightens it by foregrounding his vulnerability.
All the same, it’s hard to shake off a certain discomfort. “Cloud 9” celebrated the advent of a more sexually liberated future, but the anything-goes irreverence of the late-70s came at a human cost, as we now know. This play remains invigoratingly provocative, but its triumphalism belongs to a more innocent age.
Cloud 9
Through Jan. 13 at the National Theater in London; nationaltheatre.org.uk.
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