TORONTO - Forget silver linings. Cloud 9 — Caryl Churchill’s sexy ’70s gender-bending comedy — has moments that are truly golden.
Subtitled A Comedy Of Multiple Organisms, Cloud 9 — which opened in the Panasonic Theatre Tuesday under the Mirvish umbrella — is unlike most any piece of theatre we’ve seen.
Sprung perhaps from the same zeitgeist that informed George F. Walker’s Beyond Mozambique, it has been shaped, prodded and corseted into an often brilliant and witty commentary on the enduring nature of human passion and compassion, and the changing face of the morals and mores that govern them.
In a first act set in colonial Africa, Churchill offers up a madcap overview of the way we were, encapsulated in a single family living on the very edge of Victorian civilization, at the height of the empire.
Ruled by Clive, an insufferable bore played by David Jansen, that family includes wife Betty (Evan Buliung), son Edward (Ann-Marie MacDonald) and daughter Victoria (played, feminist tongue-in-cheek, by a ragdoll).
And while on the surface they represent the most proper of Victorian sensibilities, underneath they are a steaming caldron of rarely-repressed sensuality. Blair Williams (cast as a wandering adventurer), Megan Follows (double cast as a liberated widow and a repressed nurse) and Ben Carlson (as the faithful native retainer) serve as objects of distraction, while Yanna McIntosh’s unbending matriarch Maude looks on.
The second act is set in London, a century on. Many of the same characters, when they reappear, have aged only 25 years — underlining the fact that individuals and societies always change at different rates.
Betty (now played by MacDonald) is on the verge of leaving her husband, while daughter Victoria (now played by McIntosh) is married to a an updated version of her father (Williams) — but is drawn to a friendly lesbian (played by Follows), whose pre-school daughter (Jansen) is a bit of a handful.
Edward (now played by Buliung), meanwhile, has grown into a rather gay man, in love with the predatory Gerry (Carlson), who doesn’t like his sex mixed up with love.
It’s all Churchill’s longish way of saying that the human condition and the human hunger for love is immutable, but in her world getting there is considerably more than half the fun, especially with an A-list cast like this.
Under director Alisa Palmer, this is an evening filled with delicious moments — Williams as a rogue Rhodes, Carslon as a sexual coyote, Jansen as a pre-schooler, Buliung as the flower of Victorian femininity and MacDonald as grande dame lately come to self-pleasure.
Each moment is a tribute to Palmer’s vision, and each makes one wish she’d been able to maintain that vision, keeping her entire cast balanced on Churchill’s tightrope and not just individual players.
Instead, Palmer contents herself with having all her performers singing from the same song book, while failing to ensure they are all singing the same tune. Jansen’s overly self-aware pater familias sits over the first act like a shroud, while other performances on occasion fade in and out of character as though viewed through cheap glasses.
If Palmer had devoted a bit more time to shaping the kind of consistent approach a work like this demands — think Coward, with raunch — it would have been easier, perhaps, to overlook the minor pacing problems (and the clanger of a false ending) that make the first act seem overly long, as well as some of the emotional wool-gathering that mars the second.
But in the final appraisal, this is still a golden production — and, happily, beyond the footlights the difference between 10 carat and 18 carat rarely affects the sparkle.
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