Towards the end of the first half of Caryl Churchill’s 1979 play, Cloud 9, the Victorian patriarch, Clive, berates his wife Betty for being promiscuous. “I have never thought of you having the weakness of your sex,” Clive says, “Only the good qualities.” The joke is on Clive. In Churchill’s gender-bending colonial commentary, Betty is not played by a woman, but by a man.