Legacies That Cannot Be Escaped: The Connections Between Acts in Cloud 9 Claudia Excaret Santos Campusano College

Cloud 9, by Caryl Churchill, is a farce in two contrasting acts that follows the life of a family. The first act takes place in a British colony in Africa, in Victorian times, and the second one takes place in London 1979, but for the members of the family the difference is just of twenty five years from one act to the other. The relation that the characters in the second act have to the characters in the first act imitates the human impossibility of not being influenced by what precede us.

What could be perceived as the characters ideals changes drastically from the first to the second act: Betty goes from living around Clive to leave him, and Edward goes from hiding his feminine attitudes to admitting them. Nevertheless, there are other changes that can be noticed by generations: Betty could not be with Ellen, but Victoria can be with Lin; Maud could not expect the company of men, but Betty is able to ask for it; Betty tried to go away with Harry, but Edward stops trying to keep a men who wants his freedom. The actions are not independent from the previous act, because all of them are linked either by being able what could not have been done or by being a reflection of previous actions.

In the first act when Betty suggests...