As the actors romp onto stage in Victorian era costumes, singing a boisterous Gilbert and Sullivan-style paean to England, the tone for the first act is immediately and hilariously established in Kip Williams’ brilliantly staged production of Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play Cloud Nine.

^{Josh McConville as Clive. Photograph © Daniel Boud}

Churchill is a fascinating writer, combining a fierce intelligence with a playful, formal inventiveness, and though Cloud Nine was written nearly 40 years ago, and some of its observations are now somewhat outmoded, it still has plenty to say.

A study of sexual and identity politics, the play unfolds over two acts, which are not only wildly different in tone and style but separated by more than a century. The first act is set in Colonial Africa in the Victorian era and centres on a terribly British family headed by Clive (Josh McConville), a colonial administrator and pompous patriarch.

Churchill specifies that Clive’s coy wife Betty should be played by a man (Harry Greenwood), his nine-year old son Edward by a woman (Heather Mitchell), his daughter Victoria by a doll, and his black servant Joshua by a white actor (Matthew Backer). The...