Cloud Cover: (Re) Dressing Desire and Comfortable Subversions in Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine

Scholars have maintained that Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine unites Brechtian and deconstructive strategies in a dramatic form that subverts traditional representations of gender and sexuality. Yet this reception has consistently overlooked the repressive undercurrents that surface in the movement from the text of Churchill's play to a performance of it. Indeed, a fundamental disparity exists between the play's seemingly progressive textual pronouncements and the effects of its oft-celebrated dramaturgical strategies. The use of theatrical techniques like cross-casting harbors surprisingly reactionary attitudes that reinforce heterosexual imperatives by presenting homoerotic desires in conventional, stereotypical forms. Underlying these reactionary attitudes, I argue, is a liberal ideology that restricts the expression of gay male and lesbian desire to terms that reaffirm heterosexual norms. The play thus perpetuates a disturbingly naive and demonstrably repressive notion of acceptance of sexual diversity, a notion in which difference is easy to accept because it is not enacted.