August 21, 2012
\nAdelaide
\nTheatre<\/p>\n
Top Girls
\nby Caryl Churchill
\nState Theatre Company
\nDunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre
\nAugust 21. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59
\nBookings : BASS 131 246
\nUntil September 8.<\/p>\n
It is almost thirty years to the day since Top Girls, Caryl Churchill\u2019s freewheeling play about class, gender and the rise of Thatcherism, first opened at London\u2019s Royal Court – and the question is : how much have things changed and how much have they stayed the same ? <\/p>\n
In State Theatre\u2019s spirited revival, director Catherine Fitzgerald ably manages the disparate elements of Churchill\u2019s sometimes demanding text. The long opening dinner party scene reflects the playwright at her most theatrically audacious as management top girl Marlene presides over a surreal colloquium of various women from history and mythology. <\/p>\n
Some are paragons of female duty \u2013 like Lady Nijo, the 13th century Japanese courtesan and Patient Griselda, the obedient wife from the pages of Boccaccio and Chaucer, others are rebels against the patriarchy like the cross-dressing Pope Joan, the ferocious Dull Gret depicted in the painting by Brueghel, and closer to our own time, the zany 19th century explorer Isabella Bird. <\/p>\n
The remainder of the play, set in the naturalistic present of 1982, is the more prosaic tale of two sisters \u2013 Joyce, who stays close to home and family duty, and Marlene, who heads to the big smoke – London and up the corporate ladder of the Top Girls Employment Agency. <\/p>\n
Designer Mary Moore\u2019s splendid minimalist set (pleasingly lit by Mark Pennington) uses a suspended canopy of ruptured perspex, wittily presenting the glass ceiling which Marlene has broken through but which closes again for the scenes involving Joyce and her low-achieving young daughter Angie. <\/p>\n
Fitzgerald and her excellent cast strongly emphasise the energy and warmth of the text \u2013 bringing gusto to the dinner party despite the daunting effect of Churchill\u2019s deliberately overlapping dialogue. The vignettes are vivid : Eileen Darley as the eccentric Isabella, Lia Reutens as the coquettish Lady Nijo and Sally Hildyard\u2019s brave-hearted Dull Gret. <\/p>\n
In the domestic scenes Antje Guenther\u2019s Angie is touchingly vulnerable and Carissa Lee is also convincing as Kit the kid next door. The employment agency scenes \u2013 where the top girls lop down and winnow the employment hopes of the unskilled, inexperienced and un-beautiful – are Churchill at her satiric best. <\/p>\n
As the sisters, Marlene and Joyce, Ulli Birve and Eileen Darley memorably capture the particulars of sibling friction and the class division which the text heavily emphasises.<\/p>\n
Top Girls is an original and provocative play but it divides audiences. For some it flags its themes too obviously, while others might equally say that thirty years on, the fact that, for many, nothing much has changed, is not nearly obvious enough.<\/p>\n
Murray Bramwell<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen of note sound warnings on division\u201d
\nThe Australian, August 23, 2012, p.15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
August 21, 2012 Adelaide Theatre Top Girls by Caryl Churchill State Theatre Company Dunstan Playhouse, Adelaide Festival Centre August 21. Tickets $ 25 – $ 59 Bookings : BASS 131 246 Until September 8. It is almost thirty years to the day since Top Girls, Caryl Churchill\u2019s freewheeling play about class, gender and the rise of Thatcherism, first opened at London\u2019s Royal Court – and the question is : how much have things changed and how much have they stayed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,5,14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-23","category-archive","category-state-theatre-company","category-theatre"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1815"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1816,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1815\/revisions\/1816"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/murraybramwell.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}