CLOUD NINE
at the Theatre Building
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That’s a big agenda for this gender-bending play, which is too clever in its clutter and too fragmented in its focus. Churchill’s script sometimes betrays its origins in an actors’ workshop; a lot here seems written in italics. Nonetheless the play makes its characters, stylized in the first act and solid in the second, say more about the forces behind feminism and its challenge than a score of tracts. In rotating repertory with Pierre Marivaux’ The Triumph of Love, Court Theatre’s revival is crisp and clean, staged by Nicholas Rudall with wit, warmth, and a sure grasp of the difference between the play’s stylized satire and its convictions.
With the Victorians so little was permitted that every revolt mattered. In the second act, set in 1979 London, so much is permitted that little matters. The characters have lost the sexual repression that freed the Victorians to build their empires, but they’re now fearful of intimacy, bored with domesticity, or horny as hell. Which means they’re desperate enough to experiment.
Shakespeare well knew how “power changes purpose”; in prosecuting the letter of the law, Angelo forfeits its spirit. He loses his virtue when he falls in love with the virtuous Isabella; discarding his law-and-order image, he engages in what we would call sexual harassment. But rigidly protecting her purity, Isabella refuses Angelo, though submitting to him could save her brother, whom Angelo has sentenced to death for fornication.
