Her father, a cartoonist, would have a major impact on her future dramatic work. A succession of powerful and challenging plays have followed, including Top Girls (1982), Fen (1983), Serious Money (1987), Mad Forest (1990), and Far Away (2000), but Cloud Nine has retained its lead position as essential Churchill: a summary statement of the playwright’s amazing theatrical resources and brilliant repossession of the Shavian drama of ideas.Ĭhurchill was born in 1938 in London. With Churchill, as critic Benedict Nightingale once commented, “We can no longer patronise women playwrights as peripheral.” Cloud Nine, first performed in Britain in 1979 and in New York in 1981, was Churchill’s breakout play, gaining her international recognition as an accomplished and unavoidable force in modern drama. Churchill would emerge from a group of politically engaged British playwrights working in the radical theater movement who challenged the dominance of the social realistic drama pioneered by John Osborne and the psychological theater of Harold Pinter to become one of the most performed and admired con-temporary playwrights. Of all the plays of the 1970s and 1980s that offered a radical and daring reassessment of sex, race, and gender, Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill is certainly one of the most innovative and timeless in treating its subjects in the widest possible context of power politics, patriarchy, and modern identity. Caryl Churchill, Interview in Ms., May 1982 Max, the director, even said, at the beginning “Well shouldn’t you perhaps be doing this with a woman director?” He didn’t see that it was his subject as well. There was nothing that also involved straight men. I felt there were quite a few women’s groups doing plays from that point of view. was to write a play about sexual politics that would not just be a woman’s thing.
One of the things I wanted very much to do, in Cloud Nine.
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