If any liberationist purpose underlies this diptych of British sexuality under the reign of two dear Queens, Caryl Churchill has wisely left it well concealed. The only didactic point that occurred to me after [viewing Cloud Nine] … was that its abrupt contrast between seething lust in a Kiplingesque colonial outpost and polymorphous experimentation in modern London illustrated the decline of farce writing in direct proportion to the relaxation of moral taboo.

That begs the question that Miss Churchill wanted to write a farce in the first place. It is a fine piece …, but I think Miss Churchill disregards the crude facts of audience psychology by starting the evening with some uproariously coarse jokes at the expense of Victorian pieties, and then modulating into something altogether gentler and non-satirical. Long into last night's the second half, there were uneasy giggles from spectators trying to view a study in sexual evolution as if it were another ludicrous chapter in the history of the White Man's Burden.

However, one can see why Miss Churchill has settled for this arrangement, and why she defies chronology by bringing back her Victorian characters in no more than middle-age in the second act. Cloud Nine is an exercize on the theme of ghosts; of the persistence of supposedly discarded moral imperatives. And it makes the point by showing them at the height of their power before examining the variety of modern rebellion against them.

To put that another way, it is about role-playing. Everyone at Clive's African outpost, from his docile wife and commanding mother-in-law to the native houseboy (the most rigidly British of the lot) has a fixed role. In the second act—which moves out of doors into a public park—the characters have to make up their own roles….

[Beyond] the laughs, the real dramatic interest lies in the double approach to character as a fixed or fluid thing. The triumph of the play … is that this point is inscribed in the casting.

Roles are doubled, and they change hands from the first to the second acts…. The production reaches a brief poetic point of rest in its … title [song]. Otherwise it points the way to Cloud Nine with a gentle playfulness, satiric without ever becoming censorious, in which sex always retains a human face.