Info for Schools

After last year’s sell out production of Blue Remembered Hills fandango theatre are returning to the award winning Union Theatre this September. This year they bring Caryl Churchill’s Cloud Nine, 30 years after it first burst onto the London stage. Set in colonial Africa and late 20th century Britain, Cloud Nine explores relationships – between women and men, men and men, women and women. It is about sex, work, mothers, Africa, power, children, grandmothers, politics, money and Queen Victoria. Cloud Nine is an unforgettable juxtaposition of satire, farce, high and low comedy and uncompromising prose that is as funny and as disturbing as when it first appeared on our stage thirty years ago in 1979. fandango theatre are keeping to the original settings of Churchill’s play, allowing today’s audience to look back to the eras of Colonialism and the late seventies, just before the Thatcher government: a time when young mothers started going back to work and women started to get equal pay, when couples started to live together unmarried, and gays and lesbians began to live openly – a time just before the Falklands War, the Miners’ Strike, Live Aid and the world pandemic AIDS. For today’s students, the play opens up the challenges and the choices that confronted their parents and grandparents and asks us to consider: How tolerant are we? Where do our taboos lie? What freedoms do we have that we didn’t have before? What has been lost? What responsibilities must we take on now? Cloud Nine does deal with adult themes, and has bad language, if it were a film then I would think it would have a 15 rating. I would think it suitable for A-Level, B-Tec, and perhaps Year 11 students, if they have spent some time studying the piece. If you are bringing a group then please feel free to get in touch with me and I can offer you the chance to spend half an hour beforehand in the auditorium with myself and a couple of the actors doing a Q&A session on our journey, discoveries, and concepts at no extra cost. I can also offer a free Resource pack, which will include some notes on my journey as a director, and some of our costume and set design concepts. I can be emailed at fandangotheatre@googlemail.com