![Cloud Nine [CLOUD 9] [Paperback]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_sIvcQrLlT0SZ1wp1WtxK0XhrRELHohWCEIXIMLTEF4khUGkSdUN00X2HLNhcCzK9iS9CJy7vlDYBARswC3IzNTQurA1WPaXRwqbgcN9VK6Sek9cC6vvjDV=s0-d)
![Cloud Nine [CLOUD 9] [Paperback]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_v5m6-H5Qwhjdvfmg8-1klwhUaDPhoEX6mlU3JbrtYClNdxSOXHZu8GPdL7VVQZHQAJmKZBdq4j5vPFmxeP716XxbfUqWNtUqWJxA=s0-d)
![Cloud Nine [CLOUD 9] [Paperback]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ubOzzrQ0fYXJEwCOCUUBAeBOIbxguACn0Y7oesUqz8QQJZdHit5dtjkOzM50VbJEKrwPSyMJAXFfdXoQrMxq69CzcnQv2wklPcSg=s0-d)
In Traps, a set of characters meet themselves and their pasts to create "plenty of sinewy lines and joyous juxtapostions"—Plays and Players
Vinegar Tom "is set in the world of seventeenth-century witchcraft, but it speaks, through its striking images and its plethora of ironic contradictions, of and to this century…"—Tribune
Light Shining in Buckinghamshire is set during the Civil War and "unflinchingly shows the intolerance that was the obverse side of the demand for common justice. Deftly, it sketches in the kind of social conditions.. that led to hunger for revolution…The play has an austere eloquence that precisely matches its subject."—The Guardian
Cloud Nine sheds light on some of the British Empire's repressed dark side and is "a marvelous play - sometimes scurrilous, always observed with wicked accuracy, and ultimately, surprisingly, rather moving. It plunges straight to the heart of the endless convolutions of sexual mores…and does so with acrobatic wit."—Guardian
Owners:"I was in an old woman's flat when a young man offering her money to move came round, that was one of the starting points of the play"—Caryl Churchill
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.
| 3 of 4 people found the following review helpful  Amazing plays, By Amazon Verified Purchase This review is from: Churchill Plays: 1: Owners; Traps; Vinegar Tom; Light Shining in Buckinghamshire; Cloud Nine (Methuen World Classics) (Vol 1) (Paperback) This collection of Caryl Churchill's early plays is astounding. Tony Kushner rightly calls her the best playwright currently writing and these plays immediately make that clear. Churchill is an unabashedly feminist playwright whose work addresses issues of power and gender throughout history. Writing in the 1960s and 1970s, her plays are experimental, politically motivated, and ideologically challenging. They are also brilliantly clever, innovative, shocking, and often darkly funny."Owners" is the most straight-forward selection here and centers around real estate agents in working-class England. "Traps" explores some similar issues of working-class England but approaches them from a more lyrical, less structured way; Churchill prefaces the play by explaining that it does not conform to the limits of reality, but is ruled by the imagination. This becomes more clear as the play progresses, and the final moments of the play--wherein all of the characters take turns... Read more |
"Cloud Nine" is about relationships - between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money, Queen Victoria and sex.
Reading the script for Caryl Churchill's 1979 play about sex and love is a special workout for the imagination. First, she asks you to imagine characters whose sexual identities and alliances shift constantly. Then she asks you to imagine that most of the characters make an impossible leap in time, from colonial Africa in the Victorian age to contemporary Britain. Lastly, she asks you to imagine some of the male characters played by women and some female characters played by men. Churchill likes to get things good and mixed up so all the audience's preconceptions about gender, romance, and "lifestyle" are scrambled, neutralized, and possibly even rebuilt. The title refers to the state of orgasmic and emotional bliss that everyone in this play seems to be striving for so desperately.
| 9 of 9 people found the following review helpful: Moral Certainties and Uncertainties, By Rob Derida (Toronto, ON CANADA) - See all my reviews This review is from: Cloud 9 (Paperback) This play is an interesting approach to the question of morality in the 'modern' age. It contrasts two worlds, one of moral certainty in a Victorian colonial home, and one of complete amorality and uncertainty in contemporary Britain. It does however go beyond these issues to deal with other important issues like Gender roles and the general issue of both mental and physical 'colonization' of people by society. This play should be read by anyone even remotely interested in these themes. 12 of 14 people found the following review helpful: Bridge Builder, This review is from: Cloud 9 (Paperback) Caryl Churchill's dark comedic play, "Cloud Nine" is a masterpiece. Though written in 1978, its commentary on gender roles and sexuality is quite compelling to our youngest generations. With the current controversey over homosexual relationships/marriage, Cloud Nine serves as window into the frustrations and fears of gay characters. People who have a hard time identifying with alternative lifestyles would have a lot to learn from reading through this play. In a way, Churchill's play is a bridge builder between the heterosexual world and the gay minority. Cloud Nine follows the story of a family. The first act takes place on a South African plantation during the English Victorian Era, while in the second act, though the characters have only aged 20 years, the action takes place in London, England in the 1970's. Clive, the family patron, is the center of a male-oriented soceity and incourages traditional family and gender roles. For the first act, his wife Betty is played by a... Read more 4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:  Can a book with an orgy be that bad?, By A Customer This review is from: Cloud 9: A Play (Revised American Edition) (Paperback) I have just finished reading Caryl Churchill's infamous play "Cloud Nine". I found the book to be an amazing tool to present to the reader those social issues which we have so desperately tried to sweep under the bed. The book is actually a play through which her use of a Brechtian style of theater keeps the reader in a sort of shocked confusion and not very comfortable. At first glance you might say it is vulgar and rude, yet a deeper evaluation proves that this play is an effective tool to dredge up what society has sunk to the bottom of the river. |
