Caryl Churchill's 'Cloud 9' Returns to London's National Theater

Caryl Churchill's "Cloud 9," the play that established her as one of the foremost feminist playwrights of the 1980s, is running at London's National Theater through Jan. 13, in a revival directed by Dominic Cooke.

The production, reviewed by The New York Times, turns the play's famous structural chaos into an allegory about the exuberance of self-discovery. A story that begins as a frivolous caper gradually crystallizes into a meditation on sexual freedom.

What makes 'Cloud 9' so radical?

Churchill's satire is relentlessly playful, mocking not just patriarchy but stagecraft itself. Genders are swapped. The young play the old and vice versa. One character, a little girl, appears onstage as 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, by design, reigns.

The through-line is Betty, the wife of a Victorian-era colonial administrator, who wails "I'm bad, bad, bad!" while confessing an adulterous infatuation. The play's message, to the extent it has one, is that having desires is not the same as being wicked.

Who plays whom in Cooke's revival?

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 collapses under a generalized outbreak of desire. Stuart Thompson plays Betty, who fancies Clive's best friend Harry — a swashbuckling, oversexed explorer played by Tom Mothersdale.

The entanglements tighten quickly:

• Harry has been sexually involved with the couple's 9-year-old son, Edward, who is in love with him. Edward is played by Ellen Robertson.
• Clive tries to bed a local widow, Mrs. Saunders (Rebecca Humphries), at one point deliberately spilling champagne on himself to cover an incriminating stain on his crotch.
• To save Harry's soul, Clive bullies him into marrying Edward's governess, Ellen (Humphries again), who is herself hopelessly infatuated with Betty.

What does this revival change?

Cooke's staging argues that the play's deliberate confusion is not a gimmick but the point: the mess of mismatched bodies, ages and genders mirrors the mess of discovering who you actually are. The Times review finds that the chaos "serves as an allegory about the exuberance of self-discovery," with the farce settling into something thoughtful.

A caveat is due. The source review covers only the production's setup and first-act mechanics in detail; it says less about how the second act — the century jump and Betty's recasting — lands in performance. Readers deciding whether to book before Jan. 13 have the premise, the cast and the critic's framing, but not a final verdict quoted here.

What is clear is the endurance of the material. More than four decades after Churchill swapped the genders and broke the timeline, a major London house still finds the play's mockery of sexual mores worth restaging — and a critic still finds its messiness radical, messy and utterly playful.