Top Girls

Synopsis

Investigation of what it takes to get to the top. If you could have dinner with anyone from history, whom would you choose? At Marlene's celebration dinner to mark her promotion to Managing Director of the Top Girls Employment Agency, she has five guests - a Pope, a Warrior, a nineteenth century Traveller, a Japanese Emperor's Courtesan and a Chaucerian Obedient Wife, all from centuries past - sharing a toast.

Our Review:

Anne Morley-Priestman - 5 November 2012

Given the time and style dichotomies in Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, a director is always going to be hard-pressed to make its three scenes into a coherent whole. Gari Jones' new production goes a considerable way towards solving the problem by incorporating a visual cohesion. Sara Perks has devised a set backed with projection screens covered in signatures and dominated by a circular raised area on a revolve.

This houses the opening dinner party and is then stripped down, as we watch, so that its stark, modernist furniture devolves into the employment agency where Marlene has just been appointed managing director and then to her sister Joyce's run-down Suffolk home. The formal chairs of the diners are ranked either side of the now-stilled revolve; actresses not directly involved in the scene being played out sit on them, and wait.

It works very well. Without the projected potted biographies of the dinner-party guests, all those overlapping...

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Latest User Review

Ms A Morgan - 12 November 2012:

Gari Jones has directed a strong interpretation of a very difficult play. The relationship between Angie and Joyce is roundly developed to ease the audience through the complexities set by the chronological displacement of the text. I particularly enjoyed Gina Isaac's layering in her portrayal of Marlene and the excellent rotating set which worked highly successfully in the office scenes. Well done Colchester's Mercury Theatre for daring to put on such a difficult production in a time of austerity when it must be more tempting to 'play it safe' with a handful of popular crowd pullers. This is an iconic classic that is not necessarily performed for your enjoyment but to make you get far more from your ticket price - the ability to leave the theatre still processing what you have just seen! Well done. ...

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