Cloud 9 is a two-act play by British playwright Caryl Churchill, first performed in 1979. The first act is set in nineteenth-century colonial Africa, while the second takes place in London in 1979, though for the characters only twenty-five years have passed. Churchill uses this disjointed structure and cross-gender casting to examine shifting dynamics of power, identity, and repression across lines of race, gender, sexuality, and colonialism. The play moves from satirical portrayals of a colonial household under Clive, a British administrator, to the more fragmented, liberating—but still conflicted—lives of his family and acquaintances in modern London, highlighting both continuity and change in the struggle against social constraints.
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