Photo credit: Johan Persson
Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 has ripened over time and its mischievous, terrifyingly enduring commentary on bias and societal roles feel stronger than ever. Nearly half a century after its premiere, it arrives at the National Theatre against a particularly strong domestic backdrop; where the rhetoric around gender is shrill and weaponised, and where reports of homophobic attacks keep climbing. Churchill has been asking since the 1970s what happens when the rules of desire and identity are imposed from above and in 2026, we still search for answers amongst the rubble of so many casualties.
Churchill's dialogue is a marvel of speed and nerve. Her words bounce and trampoline, springing from a joke into a wound before you've finished laughing. Her sentences never settle. They tumble, collide and ricochet, and the effect is intoxicating.
Dominic Cooke directs with an exacting hand. Where a lesser production might let Churchill's provocations curdle into stunt, Cooke keeps the evening tight, the comic timing surgical and the sudden drops into ‘real’ being exactly that. The famous cross-casting, in which sex and/or gender are scrambled to expose how identity is performed and policed, is never played as a gimmick. It lands as argument. The audience laughs, then catches itself laughing, then keeps thinking about why.
Then there is the stagecraft, which is quite simply staggering. Miriam Buether's set design has an enormity that is matched, scene by scene, by its intricacy. This is a world built to be both stifling and seductive, and every detail seems to know something the characters don't. It feeds Churchill's worlds rather than merely housing them, giving the text a physical argument of its own. Samuel Wyer's costumes work in perfect tandem, tailoring that is at once armour, camouflage and confession. In a play about how clothes and conventions assign us our places, Wyer's choices do tremendous dramaturgical work, delivering gags, pathos and quiet subversion in a single silhouette. Together, Buether and Wyer manage to physicalise the invisible rules of gender and power.
The cast deal with their multi-rolling and Churchill’s layered text masterfully, never letting their characters’ masks drop until designed to do so. As a collective, they hold the enormity of the play’s questions in their hands and are never greedy. It leaves the audience fed.
This is the National Theatre doing what it exists to do: taking a great, difficult, thrilling play and giving it the scale, the craft and the intelligence it deserves. This play is a true spectacle that is amusing, furious and fantastically made.
***** Five stars
Reviewed by: Jeff Mostyn
Cloud 9 plays in the National’s Lyttelton theatre until 13 January, with further info here.
