Dominic Cooke directs a new production of Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9 in the Lyttelton Theatre, 2 November 2026 to 13 January 2027.
Caryl Churchill workshopped Cloud 9 with Joint Stock in 1978 and it opened in Devon in February 1979. The first act is a British colony in Victorian Africa; the second is London in 1979. The same actors play both, and the casting is the argument: in Act One a wife is played by a man, a Black servant by a white actor, a daughter by a doll, because that is what the colony required them to be. In Act Two, a hundred years later, the characters have aged twenty-five years and are allowed to be themselves, more or less, and the play asks how much of the first act they are still carrying.
It is nearly fifty years old and remains the most formally daring thing in the modern English repertoire, partly because the joke and the argument are the same device. Churchill is in her late eighties and still writing, and the recent plays have got shorter and stranger rather than safer.
Dominic Cooke directs it in the Lyttelton from Monday 2 November 2026 to Wednesday 13 January 2027 — ten weeks, the longest run on the National’s autumn schedule, carrying the theatre through Christmas. Cooke ran the Royal Court for six years and has spent his career on plays that put politics inside a family, which is what Churchill does here twice over.