The conservative party has a history of female leaders, yes, but feminist ones? Not yet. This revival of Top Girls points towards the smokescreen success of Conservative women leaders- then Thatcher, and now May, who put the interests of the privileged at heart and adhere to the sexist status quo. Katherine Kingsley – Marlene, Naomi Yang Jeanne in Top Girls by Caryl Churchill. ‘Our Marlene’s got far more balls than Howard and that’s that’, we’re told after Marlene takes a male colleague’s job. I don’t understand it.’ The same can be said for the women in the rest of the work, who play a man’s game of who can be the most callous and unemotional. As Joan says, impatient with Lady Nijo’s performative modesty and tears, ‘I didn’t live a woman’s life. In the first act, the characters pit masculinity against feminine wiles and fragility. Except much like Thatcher, who loathed feminism, the women in Top Girls take no pride in presenting themselves as women. ‘If you want anything done’, famously remarked Margaret Thatcher, ‘ask a woman’. We learn that Marlene left home when she was 17, leaving her illegitimate baby, Angie, to her working-class sister.
Theatrical review of top girls play professional#
The surreal first act gives way (as Ian MacNeil’s restaurant set design shrinks away into the distance) to the latter half of the play’s kitchen sink-style scenes exploring Marlene’s professional and personal life. With the rise of Thatcher and a spirit of optimism consuming the country, Marlene is certain that the future belongs to women like her.īut as ever with Churchill, humour spearheads you to darkness. In the audacious opening gambit, Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) celebrates her promotion to managing director at Top Girls employment agency with a boozy dinner party, inviting various women from history she considers to be her symbolic peers- including Pope Joan rumoured to have held the papacy (strongly performed by Amanda Lawrence) and Dull Gret (Ashley McGuire) from the Brueghel painting. Lyndsey Turner’s refreshing production asks important questions today about the horizon’s of Britain’s women, and calls on the living to act on behalf of our historic women. This can be seen in her brilliant 1982 play Top Girls now getting a timely revival at the National Theatre- carrying us from a timeless zone to the 1980s to something much like the present, the work engages with issues of gender, and tackles a bourgeois interpretation of feminism which had become prevalent under Thatcher. One of the great things about Caryl Churchill is her use of history to explore the present and anticipate the future.
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