10 - The strategy of play: Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine (1979)

Summary

Playwrights don't give answers, they ask questions. We need to find new questions, which may help us to answer the old ones or make them unimportant, and this means new subjects and new forms.

A recurrent theme of this book is that the revolutionary aspirations of the socialist playwrights in Britain of the 1970s and 1980s ultimately failed to bring about any clearly discernible social or political restructuring. Indeed, political opinion has generally swung to the right over the succeeding years. However, there was one radical political movement that has had an obvious and immediate effect on the laws, economy and social attitudes of the British nation, namely the women's movement. While there is undoubtedly much that remains to be done before a wholly successful revolution may be proclaimed, the achievements of feminism are nevertheless considerable: revision of laws affecting women, decisive moves towards equal pay and conditions in the workplace, and generally the acknowledgment of the rights of women, right down to the avoidance of gender-based terminology.

The simple but ultimately effective message of the feminist movement was summed up in the oft-repeated phrase, ‘The personal is political.’ In place of – or often alongside – the demand for a total restructuring of society along socialist lines, feminism in the 1960s sought to establish more immediately attainable principles of equality and justice by organizing a fairer share of labour in the home and by rewarding women equally in the workplace.