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 - 31 January 2012

You don’t need to read Mary Luckhurst’s apologia for the plays of Caryl Churchill in the programme for this new Out of Joint tour to realise that Top Girls has a fault-line running through it. The first act is so brilliantly staged by Max Stafford-Clark and designer Tim Shortall that anything else is bound to be an anti-climax. Not to say a let-down.

It’s a bit of a period piece, in too many ways. The power-dressing and power-politics of the 1980s seem to belong to another era altogether. Which, of course, they do. So we’re left with a first scene in which various historical and fictional characters sit down in the aptly named La Prima Donna restaurant to regale us with their life stories. Like all people with fascinating pasts, they’re more eager to regale us with these than to actually listen to what anyone else is saying. The overlapping dialogue seems to parallel one of those slow-building ensembles in 19th century opera.

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