The play that changed my life: ‘Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 had us dancing in the aisles’
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.
The play is a provocation, but it’s also ultimately a celebration of us being able to find new possibilities of who we might be and how we might relate to each other. It led me into a whole series of things. I went on to work with a feminist theatre company in the US, came back and set up New Playwrights Trust and wrote a book, She Also Wrote Plays, a guide to female playwrights from around the world. That led to the project I run now, Unfinished Histories, about alternative theatre from the 1960s to 80s.
Everyone in Cloud 9 is questioning gender and gender roles and sexuality. It doesn’t gloss over some of the difficulties of negotiating that, and the old histories and baggage that you carry with you. But it is also incredibly liberating. There was this song: “The bride was 65, the groom was 17, / They fucked in the back of the black limousine. / It was divine in their silver Cloud 9.” When we gave them a standing ovation they played that song a second time. I remember dancing in the aisles thinking: “Yes! This is about us now” – and older people were kind of looking at how we might make a world anew.
• The Unfinished Histories exhibition Radical Rediscovery: Feminist Theatre in Britain 1969-1992 is at the London Performance Studios, 8 November-1 December.
• As told to Lindesay Irvine
