Top Girls

Caryl Churchill explores what it means to be a woman and a feminist in her play Top Girls. It begins with a unique premise: when career-driven businesswoman Marlene receives a promotion at work, she invites several historical and literary figures to a dinner party to celebrate her success. As the night progresses, we learn of each woman’s backstory and the hardships they faced in life, including rape, abuse, and abandonment. The remaining acts shift the narrative to Marlene’s home life and her strained relationship with her family. Top Girls is a strong critique of pseudo-feminists who raise themselves up on the backs of others and define their feminism purely by their successes in business. Although the play was originally written show more and performed in the early 1980s, its themes feel incredibly relevant today in light of the current political/social climate and the #metoo movement. show less

Oh, this play made me cry. It's a brutal yet humourous portrayal of Marlene (a top executive) and her sister (a single mother) and manages to illustrate the questions of duty, choice, motherhood and what women should be brilliantly while leaving us no easy answers or trite moral messages at the end of the play.

Churchill explores the various ways women have coped with ambition and maternity in fable and history. At an imaginary dinner for a modern woman celebrating her promotion at an employment agency, famous characters from history join her to talk to each other and share their stories: Griselda and Pope Joan, Isabella Bird, Lady Niho, Dull Gret. Scene 2 brings us to the more concrete present, where we see what has earned her this promotion, how she treats and coaches the women she places. Act 2 reveals what her life has cost her, and others, and what it might mean to give up everything to be Top Girl. Very much of its Thatcherite time, but still relevant.

Churchill's play is a mix of drama and comedy, with elements of fantasy and Freud thrown in for good effect. I enjoyed seeing a performance of the play more than I enjoyed reading it. This was primarily because the acting and the direction of the play brought out its best moments.

Top Girls is the story of one woman’s rise to success and of the other women in her life (as well as those in history) whose experiences call hers into question. Its all-female cast speaks from a wide variety of cultural and political positions in dialogue that is orchestrated on the page almost like musical lines and themes, with numerous interruptions, dual conversations, and simultaneous speeches which undercut or highlight one another. The resulting show more development of the play shows success for the assertive Marlene who has reached the top of the hierarchy at an employment agency, along with the price that she had to pay to achieve that success. The darker side of the play portrays her sister and niece who are living a more proletarian lifestyle.

The mixture of the two with the addition of a lengthy fantastic dinner scene to open the play provides more questions than answers about what the message of the drama is. Since it was first produced in 1982, the play may be a little dated, but much of the drama seems timely enough. It is the somewhat confusing delivery of that drama over the space of two acts and five scenes that left this reader slightly less than satisfied. show less

i really liked the first act; the second two felt like a tease to me - like, clearly there is a history here between these characters, but we're never really allowed into it. we're always being kept outside. i just felt lukewarm about the whole thing, really.
i do think that this issue i feel with the characterisation could be resolved on stage - not only through the ability of the actor, but also through doubling between the historical and modern figures. (my copy gestured towards this doubling in the introduction but didn't actually include what that doubling typically is, which i thought was silly.)

Because I was listening to this play rather than watching it, the switch from Marlene's dinner party to her niece was jarringly abrupt. In fact, at first I thought that there was a problem with the recording. The dinner party was amusing so I didn't expect the emotion of the ending (though upon reflection, there was plenty of foreshadowing).

Listened to this play courtesy of the LATW website streaming broadcast.

Set in the early Thatcher years, Top Girls is a serminal play of the modern theatre, revealing a world of women's experience at a pivotal moment in British history. Told by an eclectic group of historical and modern characters in a continuous conversation across ages and generations, Top Girls was hailed as 'the best British play ever by a woman dramatist'