Churchill

Plays One

Caryl Churchill

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1985
• ISBN:
  9781136797729
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático

The plays in this volume represent the best of Churchill's writing up to and including her emergence onto the international theatre scene with "Cloud Nine." The volume also contains a new introduction by the author as well as short prefaces to each play.

CLOUD NINE

Cloud Nine

Cloud Nine was written for Joint Stock Theatre Group in 1978-79. The company’s usual work method is to set up a workshop in which the writer, director and actors research a particular subject. The writer then goes away to write the play, before returning to the company for a rehearsal and rewrite period. In the case of Cloud Nine the workshop lasted for three weeks, the writing period for twelve, and the rehearsal for six.

The workshop for Cloud Nine was about sexual politics. This meant that the starting point for our research was to talk about ourselves and share our very different attitudes and experiences. We also explored stereotypes and role reversals in games and improvisations, read books and talked to other people. Though the play’s situations and characters were not developed in the workshop, it draws deeply on this material, and I wouldn’t have written the same play without it.

When I came to write the play, I returned to an idea that had been touched on briefly in the workshop – the parallel between colonial and sexual oppression, which Genet calls ‘the colonial or feminine mentality of interiorised repression’. So the first act of Cloud Nine takes place in Victorian Africa, where Clive, the white man, imposes his ideals on his family and the natives. Betty, Clive’s wife, is played by a man because she wants to be what men want her to be, and, in the same way, Joshua, the black servant, is played by a white man because he wants to be what whites want him to be. Betty does not value herself as a woman, nor does Joshua value himself as a black. Edward, Clive’s son, is played by a woman for a different reason – partly to do with the stage convention of having boys played by women (Peter Pan, radio plays, etc.) and partly with highlighting the way Clive tries to impose traditional male behaviour on him. Clive struggles throughout the act to maintain the world he wants to see – a faithful wife, a manly son. Harry’s homosexuality is reviled, Ellen’s is invisible. Rehearsing the play for the first time, we were initially taken by how funny the first act was and then by the painfulness of the relationships – which then became more funny than when they had seemed purely farcical.

The second act is set in London in 1979 – this is where I wanted the play to end up, in the changing sexuality of our own time. Betty is middle-aged, Edward and Victoria have grown up. A hundred years have passed, but for the characters only twenty-five years. There were two reasons for this. I felt the first act would be stronger set in Victorian times, at the height of colonialism, rather than in Africa during the 1950s. And when the company talked about their childhoods and the attitudes to sex and marriage that they had been given when they were young, everyone felt that they had received very conventional, almost Victorian expectations and that they had made great changes and discoveries in their lifetimes.

The first act, like the society it shows, is male dominated and firmly structured. In the second act, more energy comes from the women and the gays. The uncertainties and changes of society, and a more feminine and less authoritarian feeling, are reflected in the looser structure of the act. Betty, Edward and Victoria all change from the rigid positions they had been left in by the first act, partly because of their encounters with Gerry and Lin.

In fact, all the characters in this act change a little for the better. If men are finding it hard to keep control in the first act, they are finding it hard to let go in the second: Martin dominates Victoria, despite his declarations of sympathy for feminism, and the bitter end of colonialism is apparent in Lin’s soldier brother, who dies in Northern Ireland. Betty is now played by a woman, as she gradually becomes real to herself. Cathy is played by a man, partly as a simple reversal of Edward being played by a woman, partly because the size and presence of a man on stage seemed appropriate to the emotional force of young children, and partly, as with Edward, to show more clearly the issues involved in learning what is considered correct behaviour for a girl.

It is essential for Joshua to be played by a white, Betty (I) by a man, Edward (I) by a woman, and Cathy by a man. The soldier should be played by the actor who plays Cathy. The doubling of Mrs Saunders and Ellen is not intended to make a point so much as for sheer fun – and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Caryl Churchill: A chronology
• Introduction
• Owners
• Traps
• VInegar Tom
• Light Shining in Buckinghamshire
• Cloud Nine