Clouds

by Michael Frayn

Owen Shorter, professional journalist, and Mara Hill, well known lady novelist, discover at the beginning of the play that they have been sent to Cuba to write for rival colour supplements.

Genres: Plays, Drama

Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Michael Frayn is an English playwright and novelist. He is best known as the author of the farce Noises Off and the dramas Copenhagen and Democracy. His novels, such as Towards the End of the Morning, Headlong and Spies, have also been critical and commercial successes, making him one of the handful of writers in the English language to succeed in both drama and prose fiction. His works often raise philosophical questions in a humorous context. Frayn's wife is Claire Tomalin, the biographer and literary journalist.

Reviews

[Nick Jones · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’ve recently been reading early Michael Frayn plays and not really enjoying them. If they were novels I would have given up long ago, but a play only takes a couple of hours or so to read – so I carry on reading Michael Frayn because there are a lot in the town library. Clouds feels like a sitcom. Not formally. I think it is to do with Owen, the journalist writing a story on Cuba. He is cynical and negative, putting down his inexperienced fellow journalist Mara who is on the same mission for a rival newspaper; Owen reminds me of the privileged graduates returning to their Oxford college for a reunion in Frayn’s previous play Donkey’s Years. At first the play seems as though it is going to satirise the smugness of the character, but after a while you realise that Owen is getting the best lines: he is one of those loveably grumpy characters that inhabit sitcoms. (This impression was furthered when I noticed that Nigel Hawthorne played the character during the play’s first run: Hawthorne is most famous to the British public for his role in the BBC sitcom Yes Minister.) The most notable characteristic of sitcom characters is that they never develop – if they did the basic situation that is necessary for the comedy would be destroyed. And Owen, like the privileged bunch in Donkey’s Years, doesn’t develop. Things happen, there is a narrative – it turns out that all of Owen’s animosity towards Mara is romantic desire, but the play can’t become a romcom because Owen is married. Maybe Clouds becomes wistful and sad. But I don’t really know what it is doing (and that might be because I am missing the obvious) and I don’t know what the Owen-Mara relationship has to do with the Cuba that they are visiting and the satire around official journalistic visits. Maybe in a good production there are amusing lines, but it all seems a little inconsequential.

[Stuart Aken · Rating 3 out of 5]

First performed at the Hampstead Theatre, London, in August 1976, this two act play is another of Frayn’s comedies. However, I’m at a loss to know for certain what it’s really about.

Set in Cuba (though the stage is a blank arena with stepped surfaces, chairs and a back-projection screen to receive the images of the sky that give the play its name) the action revolves around a trio of writers who are there to report on the state of the island a short time after Castro’s takeover. As a teenager during the time of the Cuba Crisis, when we held our collective breath as Kruschev and Kennedy postured over the issue of nuclear missiles sited on the island, Cuba holds a resonance unlikely to echo through the blood of the modern reader.

There’s a love story in here, though it may be that simple lust is the driver, in spite of the protestations of the protagonists. There are cultural misunderstandings, cynicism on an epic scale, subtle, and not so subtle, political asides, and, of course, humour. The go-getting American, the lady novelist and the reporter from the UK are stereotypical yet manage to convey some individuality. The tired diplomat-cum-guide-cum-minder is just that, but hovers between his sense of duty and the lust he develops for the lady novelist. The driver is a rogue, philanderer and wide-boy with an obvious eye for the ladies and the only male in the cast who appears immune to the charms of the novelist.

So, an interesting cast with an intriguing span of relationships. We follow them on their odd tour of the island, a typical itinerary for a communist regime, ensuring these foreigners see all the technical and commercial developments but are excluded from intercourse with the actual people wherever possible. There is the standard misunderstanding, deliberate or otherwise, between the eventual would-be lovers. There is the expected friction between the American and British writers. There is the unconscious condescension shown by the writers for their guardian and driver. But, in the hands of this master, the sometimes spare dialogue is made to say so much more than the mere words.

I imagine the sparse setting would enhance the dialogue, which is what the play is all about, removing visual distractions so that all attention is given to the characters as they set about their tasks of misinformation, professional and personal rivalry, seduction and petty jealousy.

The text made me laugh where I was expected to find humour. It made me react emotionally to the various scenes of conflict, co-operation, misunderstanding and attempted sexual conquest. But I was left with an ending that seemed unfinished and flat. I didn’t expect an explosion, merely something that wound up at least something of the action that had preceded it, rather than the rather vague conclusion that the experience had changed nothing.

Would I go to see the play performed? I wouldn’t queue, but if it were easy to attend, I think I’d give it a try. Make of that what you will.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

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