[Cloud 9 is] a very funny play full of odd dramatic spasms. It probably helps to have an interest in England and its former empire with its setting sun. Yet beyond this, it is fundamentally a play about love relationships to which that fading Empire merely provides the backcloth.

The play is in two distinct parts. The first is Africa in 1880…. The second part is London in 1980, although as the playwright Caryl Churchill is at ambiguous pains to point out, "… but for the characters it is only 25 years later."

I'm not sure what that means either. Presumably Miss Churchill is implying that the British pattern of relationships has been colored by Britain's imperial past—a concept that other British playwrights such as David Storey and Peter Nichols have also hinted at. Possible—but probably irrelevant to one's ultimate enjoyment of the play.

Miss Churchill is saying here—despite the imperial background—that all human relationships, if genuine, have their validity. Her fantastic parade of heterosexuals, homosexuals and bisexuals, the relationship of parents with children, the relationships of people with servants, the entire kaleidoscope of relationships, particularly sexual relationships, come under her hilarious yet loving scrutiny.

What I really like about Miss Churchill is not merely her sweetly deft writing skills, although they do help, but her moral inability to put anyone or anything down. She makes judgments on relations and relationships, but she is never judgmental. Perhaps it is actually the quality of discreet acceptance that made the British Empire what it was, and is still maintained in some shadowed shape in British society today….

This is a zany play, but one with terrific wit and humanity to it. It is far from perfect—in fact, it is sometimes positively disorganized. Yet it is a play that has something to say to us today about kindness, affection, perversion and most of all, love.