Cloud 9: Slightly dated work by greatest living playwright Caryl Churchill

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At the National Theatre, this comedy about a colonial Victorian family in Africa has accomplished performances but not all the material has aged well

London theatre is rightly paying obeisance to Caryl Churchill, who at 88 has a claim to be our greatest living playwright and is certainly the most consistently bold and adventurous. New short works are due at the Almeida next year, and the National here revives her 1979 comedy about gender, sexuality and power structures, the first of her works to received serious attention.

Unfortunately, though Dominic Cooke’s strongly cast production is as fluent as one could wish, the play resonates more for its historical significance than its contemporary appeal. The humour feels broad and coarse and some aspects have not aged well.

Evolved through a series of workshops Cloud 9 was revolutionary in structure, subject matter and staging for its time. The first half is a farce about a colonial Victorian family in Africa where transgressive sexual urges repeatedly erupt through the veneer of propriety.

The second sees some of the same characters, aged by just 25 years but projected to a London park in the late 1970s, exploring new frontiers in sexuality, identity and modes of living. Across both halves there are frank discussions of masturbation, same sex and intergenerational acts, and a hilarious depiction of upskirt cunnilingus.

The then-bold cross-gender casting and symbolism (the Victorian wife is played by a man, her young son by a woman, and her infant daughter by a dummy) no longer look so surprising or clever. The original portrayal of a black servant by a white actor – designed to show how colonialism oppresses and deracinates – is impossible to countenance today, so the paired roles of the African “boy” Joshua and the promiscuous cruiser Gerry are played by black actor Eloka Ivo.

One of the key jokes in the first half is that Clive (Sam Troughton), an administrator ruthlessly oppressing the local population, idolises his explorer friend Harry Bagley (Tom Mothersdale), without realising Harry has already seduced his wife Betty, his son Edward and Joshua too.

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