Sex puzzle
Peter Jenkins
Cloud Nine (Royal Court) Joint Stock starts with the acting. The style has become established, almost stylised, but is still quite different to what most theatre goers are used to seeing. The actors have helped to shape the characters they are acting, from outside as well as from the inside; in effect they have helped to write the play. In part the inspiration was Brechtian, the actor stepping back from the part and helping the audience to break the spell of theatrical illusion; partly it derived from an American fashion for acting out everyday experiences and partly also from a British desire to be topical and political.
Cloud Nine by Caryl Churchill brings out the virtues and exposes the vices of the Joint Stock technique. Its most constant danger is degeneration into a mere sequence of acting exercises, or cabaret turns, loosely plotted together. The element of improvisation is liable to take on an air of school-play larkishness unless the, proceedings are structured with a good deal more art than meets the eye. Another trouble is that however perceptive and sensitive the performers may be for the purpose of capturing daily experience or speech they can not be guaranteed to rise above a portentous banality of social, political and philosophic comment — but then some of our theatre writers have no need of the assistance of actors to that end.
Caryl Churchill's play is her second for Joint Stock and is heavily contrived as a vehicle for the company's and Max Stafford-Clark's talents. The theme is sex — sex of all manner and variety — and the perennial hypocrisy towards it. Part One ,of
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