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

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. Eloka Ivo (Joshua) and Tom Mothersdale (Harry Bagley) in Cloud 9 at the National TheatreJohan PerssonOne 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. That the pederasty and the sexual exploitation of a native underclass is still played for laughs feels distinctly uncomfortable, particularly with celebrity predators currently all over the headlines. The way Edward is clouted and derided (“sissy”, “girly”) for playing with dolls and failing to man up is another expression of warping male dominance that feels discomfiting today. In the first half, Charlotte Ritchie hilariously plays the sternly humourless mother of Betty (Stuart Thompson), whose own wedding-night advice to her sapphically adoring governess Ellen – who’s being married off to Harry for decorum’s sake - is “you just keep still”. In the second Richie is Betty’s grown-up daughter Victoria, a lecturer exploring lesbianism with a fellow young mum, and Thompson is the grown-up Edward, now a gay man who assumes “wifely” roles. They edge towards a pagan polyamory that embraces incest – another relic of 70s permissiveness that hasn’t date well, but maybe I’m just old-fashioned.Ellen Robertson, who plays Edward in the first half, is very funny as the older Betty in the second, divorcing from Clive and exploring the new wonders of working life and self-love. Mothersdale pairs the gung-ho Harry with Martin, Victoria’s tetchy babyfather, whose feminist allyship and wish to give her “rolling orgasms” is itself controlling. Read MoreRebecca Humphries, who is both Ellen and a dreadnought widow in the first half, excels in the second as lesbian Lin, whose brother, a soldier in Northern Ireland, is a contemporary parallel for the Victorian invaders. The lavishly bearded Troughton becomes her young daughter Cathy, an assemblage of selfish desires and gawky limbs: another conceptual joke that looks tired today.The first half is played as farce, with a lot of front-facing mugging, as if the cast are posing for a box camera. The second, after a dramatic visual coup by designer Miriam Buether(YES) which I won’t spoil, is broadly naturalistic and played with the house lights mostly up on the audience. The performances are spot on. It’s good to re-evaluate a landmark work by a giant of a writer, even if it now feels like a historical artefact rather than a work that speaks to today.