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.
