Theatre review: Cloud 9

Nowadays Caryl Churchill is gradually working towards the point where she can fit an entirely satisfying play into three minutes, but Cloud 9 comes from much earlier in her career, so it takes her three hours. Fortunately the play - which I saw over thirty years ago at university and which has been long overdue a London revival - holds up even at that extravagant running time. It's famous for two big high concepts which are deliberately designed to put the audience on the back foot: The first seems a bit more familiar now as casting against age, gender and race is pretty common, but Churchill wrote it into her script about a Victorian family at the height of the Empire. Somewhere in Africa, Clive (Sam Troughton) is the governor of a region in some turmoil, although he and his family prefer to allude fairly vaguely to the locals' uprising, hoping it won't come too close to home.So they proceed to live their lives as a comedy of manners that increasingly veers off into a sex farce, as…

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