Caryl Churchill's Cloud 9, one of English theatre's more formally daring plays, gets a new Dominic Cooke production at the National nearly fifty years after its premiere.
Dominic Cooke directs a new staging of Caryl Churchill’s Cloud 9 in the Lyttelton at the National Theatre on the South Bank, opening Monday 2 November 2026.
Churchill workshopped the play with Joint Stock in 1978, and it opened in Devon in February 1979. The first act is set in a British colony in Victorian Africa, the second in London a century later, with the same actors playing both halves.
The casting carries the argument. In Act One a man plays a wife, a white actor a Black servant and a doll a daughter. That is what the colony required them to be.
In Act Two the characters have aged only 25 years and are allowed, more or less, to be themselves. The play asks how much of the first act they still carry.
Churchill, in her late eighties, is still writing, and her recent plays have grown shorter and stranger. Cooke, who ran the Royal Court for six years, has built a career on plays that put politics inside a family, which Churchill does here twice over. The run continues to Wednesday 13 January 2027.