Writer: Caryl Churchill
Director: Maude Davey
Cultural Consultant/Dramaturg: Georgina Naidu
Dramaturg: Abby Hampton

VCA Third Year BFA Actors. June 2021.

https://finearts-music.unimelb.edu.au/showcase/cloud-9/cloud-9-credits

Notes on Cloud Nine

French playwright Jean Genet’s ‘idea that colonial oppression and sexual oppression are similar’ (Amelia Howe Kritzer) formed the basis of Caryl Churchill’s conceptual duality in Cloud Nine which was inspired also by the seminal texts Sexual Politics by Kate Millet and Franz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks.

Churchill wrote Cloud Nine in 1978 after a period of workshops with Joint Stock around the idea of Sexual Politics. We know from participant accounts of this workshop that actors were ‘selected ‘as much for their sexual proclivities as for their acting ability’ (Mary Luckhurst). It was thoughtfully considered that there be a diverse array of sexual orientation within the cast to acknowledge the concept of sexual oppression, however…where was the diverse consideration for the human experience of the other significant concept…? Colonialism. 

This erasure of race from the making process, and subsequent text must be questioned. Apollo Amoko asserts that ‘racism, the play's "other" concern’ is used as a mere metaphoric vehicle to ‘illustrates sexism, the play's "central" or "ideal" concern’. 

I have to acknowledge that the form, structure and contextual underpinning of this play are cemented in binary. Act One and Two are foils of one another, the casting requirements are oppositional and the play attempts to navigate ideas of colonialism and sexual oppression as two of the same. 

WE understand that the world is a spectrum: of gender, sexuality, neuro, ability. 

A spectrum of diversity, where nothing and no one is simply; this or that.  

This play has endless dramaturgical and social questions, many of which we have asked, -many of which we are not equipped to answer. It is my hope that these remarkable twenty-first-century actors bring to light that while in some respects we have outgrown the past, there are still those among us who continue these battles every day. 

Abby Hampton