Some thoughts after re-reading Caryl Churchill's play "Cloud 9"

Cloud 9 by Caryl Churchill

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Because the Theatre Arts Department at the University of Miami is producing the play, I will be teaching Cloud Nine this semester to my Into to Theater students. Anticipating this, I reread it this morning. So here are some thoughts...

Act One transpires in Africa during Victorian times, and Act Two jumps to London in 1979, though the characters have only aged 25 years. The historical division between the two acts is almost as significant, if not more so, than the non-traditional casting in Act One (male characters are played by women and vice-versa.) As the author writes in the introduction, Act One is set in Victorian times because she wanted to highlight the repressive gender norms, stifled sexuality, nationalism, patriarchy, and imperialistic values (which, perceptibly, she presents as being interwoven and interdependent on one another.)  It’s interesting that there is a doubling/overlap between Victorianism (“traditional” values) and the “savage” colonized African landscape in Act One. This seems intentional, as they are both representative of the past. Though the imperialists consider themselves to be “civilized,” by showcasing how the characters transform from Act One to Act Two, Churchill represents them as unevolved, or stunted, in terms of how they conceived of social progress, in the era before women's and gay liberation.

In Act One, patriarchal values reign supreme. The gay characters and the women fully accept the idea that they aren’t as valuable/good/noble as the heterosexual male father figure. Sexuality in Act One is hushed up and secretive, and exploitation of women, people of color, and homosexual men is considered to be the normal, appropriate way of doing things. These forms of repression/oppression are a priori: they are simply how the civilized world “is.”

All of this changes in Act Two, when the gay characters and the women start acquiring self-esteem and self-awareness. Betty's many lines about how she no longer defines herself through the eyes of her husband (she had previously thought it was her duty to lie still during sex, as if pleasure was something she had no right to expect, until she rediscovers the pleasures of masturbation almost accidentally) evidence her transformation. The characters’ personal growth here mirrors society’s evolution in terms of how women and gay men gain social status. By Act Two, it is possible for gays to pursue both love and sexual fulfillment uncloseted, and for women to earn a living on their own and exist relatively free of male influence. The lesbian character of Lin is the epitome of this, although she realizes by the play's end that men can also be useful, provided they cook and/or are willing to satisfy women sexually.

In terms of social theory, psychoanalysis, and theory of gender, it seems to me that this play prefigures thinkers like Judith Butler and Jack Halberstam (who have written from the 1990s to the present about the way that gender is a performance/social construct rather than something inherent or purely biological), Gayle Rubin (an anthropologist whose influential 1975 article “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex” explains how marriages were originally social contracts between two or more men, rather than between one man and one women. Rubin explained that in the pre-Modern era, the bride had little agency, but rather functioned as an object of exchange, i.e. a gift from the father to the husband that ensured a reciprocity of social relations between these two males and their male-dominated kinship networks), Eve Kosofsky-Sedgewick [who, in her book Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (1985), wrote about the importance of “homosocial relationships” in Victorian British literature. Her argument is that heterosexual men valued their relationships with one another in that era more than their relationships with their wives. In the “homosocial world” Sedgwick describes, women were not seen as equals. In fact, they were considered less than human in some ways. In the play, Churchill presents this by contrasting how the character of Clive interacts with Harry as opposed to Betty, his wife], and also post-colonial theorists like Edward Said (Orientalism, 1978) and Homi K. Bhahba (1990s-present), who both argue that the Western self-conception of superiority is dependent on a de-humanization of the colonized -- in other words, the West’s elevated conception of itself is intimately tied to its exploitation of others: its barbarism.

Frantz Fanon’s seminal psychoanalytic text Black Skin/White Mask (from 1952, in which Fanon describes how the black colonized subject internalizes the European patronizing, derogating view of him into his own psyche as a result of the dominating social forces of racism, imperialism, etc.) probably also influenced Churchill. Even if not, her dramatic writing echoes it inadvertently. (Considering the character of Joshua, a black African servant who is played by a white man in Act One, it is difficult to imagine that Churchill was completely unaware of Fanon's theories.)

It is interesting that these thinkers (other than Frantz Fanon and Gayle Rubin) actually wrote their work after Churchill wrote Cloud Nine. (Edward Said, Luce Irigaray and Monique Wittig were her contemporaries.) To me, it feels as though Churchill's playwriting (if it inherently embodies some of these ideas theatrically, and I think it does!) prefigures much of the intellectual discourse that was to come in the fields of cultural studies, critical theory (both postcolonialism and feminist theory), literary criticism, queer theory, etc. Obviously, like Butler and Halberstam, Churchill is probably also influenced by early feminist thinkers like Simone de Beauvoir (who wrote, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” as early as 1949) and Luce Irigaray (whose ideas in the 1977 text This Sex Which is Not One were similar to Gayle Rubin’s.)


Another thinker with whom I feel Churchill resonates is Adrienne Rich, who published the essay “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” in 1980, arguing that heterosexuality is enforced on women as a way of subjugating them. The female characters' blossoming lesbian identities in Act Two are meant to be seen as liberating in ways other than merely sexual (for example: economic, emotional, intellectual, psychological, etc.)

At any rate, the play seems to embody much of this extremely radical, world-changing thinking. And yet, like its predecessor, The Rover by 17th Century playwright Aphra Behn, it does this, perhaps subversively, in a very traditional centuries-old theatrical form -- a farcical satire. It is interesting that the play accurately reflects historical change, while also implying that the story of gender liberation isn’t completely finished. That the character of Cathy in Act Two is played by the same older male actor who played Clive, the patriarch, in Act One seems relevant. Here, the obstreperous little girl of the postmodern era is armed, completely fascinated by guns, despite her pink dress. She represents the potential danger that could transpire if women blindly adopt traditionally masculine values, more so than an embodiment of a utopian hope for the future. I find it interesting that Churchill wrote Cathy several decades before the likes of Sarah Palin emerged like a pitbull's lipstick-stained spitball into the public eye. (Perhaps Cathy could also be read as a reflection of Margaret Thatcher.) Considering all that has transpired in the news in the past few years regarding mass shootings and the inability of Congress to pass meaningful gun control legislation, the passages about guns in the play should be fun to play with, as it were... By presenting the character of gun-loving Cathy, Churchill asks the viewer to question the limits of liberation: does liberation simply mean wielding the same weapons as one's former oppressors? If not, what exactly are the alternatives?

A particularly interesting moment in the play, in terms of the way it contrasts with Gayle Rubin's theories, mentioned above, is when Victoria and Lin incant a chant, calling for the pre-Modern goddess to reappear: “Goddess of many names, oldest of the old, who walked in chaos and created life, hear us calling you back through time, before Jehovah, before Christ, before men drove you out and burnt your temples, hear us, Lady, give us back what we were, give us the history we haven't had, make us the women we can't be... Come back, goddess. Goddess of the sun and the moon her brother, little Goddess of Crete with snakes in your hands. Goddess of breasts. Goddess of cunts. Goddess of fat bellies and babies. And blood blood blood...” Positing a very different conception of pre-history than Rubin's, until it rejoins and affirms the main thrust of Rubin's ideas in the last two lines (my italics) of the following quotation, the scene continues: “They had men, they had sons and lovers. They had eunuchs... The priestess chose a lover for a year and he was king because she chose him and he was killed at the end of the year... And the women had the children and nobody knew it was done by fucking so they didn't know about their fathers and nobody cared who the father was and the property was passed down through the maternal line... It never hurts to understand the theoretical background. You can't separate fucking and economics.”

Also significant is the way the play both begins and ends with verbal iterations that evoke British nationalism and the Union Jack, the first triumphant, whereas the last is nostalgic and perhaps defeated. The dissolution of patriarchy here is significantly congruent with the declining of imperialistic nationalism. Yet the play's final image shows Betty (Act One, played by a man) hugging Betty (Act Two, played by a woman), and this moment seems to convey its ultimately optimistic message that somehow the past, present, and future can make peace with one another in a way that transcends antiquated ideas of nationalism, patriarchy, or social/historical/economic progress.

At any rate, I'm very much looking forward to UM's production of Cloud Nine this term, and to teaching the play to my Intro to Theater students. I have a feeling it will blow their minds, as it did mine, today, again!



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