By FRANCIS TILL
Caryl Churchill's well-crafted absurdist romp of sexual manners, Cloud 9, has aged from its genesis in 1979 to the point where it is now doubly retro, presenting juxtaposed scenarios from two worlds rather completely gone by.
As it turns out, thanks in large measure to some inventive juggling of
characters and subtext by director Edwin Wright, that's not a bad thing.
Seven actors give us 16 characters in two acts, the first of which is set in British colonial Africa and the second in a leafy London park 100 years later.
In the first half, the rigid structure of the Empire's social order imposes a restraining patina on a wild variety of sexual appetites, beneath which festers a chaotic mix of half-met, often hilariously perverse needs.
In the second, the pendulum has swung on the Empire's demands but liberation has provided only a different set of frustrations and punch lines.
Yes, you know all that. As a work lampooning sexual and emotional hypocrisy, mostly of the type associated with gender identity, there's little here to shock and some of what's on offer needs tighter pacing. Still, we haven't really passed these messages by, we've just absorbed them: old tales, yes, but far from stale.
On stage, nothing will prepare audiences for Jon Brazier's jaw-droppingly hypnotic rendition of a 5-year-old, mini-skirted, precocious girl in the second act. Anna Hewlett manages in the first act both to be an intensely prim, excruciatingly repressed governess with a lesbian crush on her mistress Betty (hats off to Jeremy Brennan for that rendition) and, only seconds later, to exude a completely captivating torrent of salacious pulchritude as a Victorian vamp, Mrs Saunders.
The lovely Amanda Billing puts considerable sexual zip into her wildly contrasting roles as a man-struck boy in the first act and an intellectually inclined bi-sexual wife in the second, while Lucy Wigmore anchors both halves wonderfully as a matriarch who learns, ultimately, that masturbation can take her to Cloud 9 and the love she cherishes most is that which she feels, across the span of a century, for her richly variegated child.
