Product Description

Annotated student edition of landmark 1980s drama in which a cast of historical female protagonists, including a Japanese courtesan, Pope Joan, and a character from a Brueghel painting are brought together to recount their personal stories in a London restaurant. Includes notes, background to the play and discussion of various interpretations.

Caryl Churchill lives in London and is one of Britain’s most important playwrights.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #545354 in Books
• Published on: 2008-09-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 98 pages

About the Author
Caryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. Her acclaimed body of work includes Three More Sleepless Nights (1980); Top Girls (1982); Fen (1983); Mouthful of Birds (1986); Serious Money (1989); The Skriker (1984); Blue/Heart (1998) and Far Away in Autumn (2000).

From AudioFile
When the curtain rises, Marlene has just gotten a promotion and is celebrating with a group of overachieving women of history. Next comes a montage of her at the employment agency where she works. Finally, comes a tense reunion with her sister and the daughter Marlene abandoned. This celebrated allegorical stage play of 1982 presents several difficulties for the audio producer. It requires eight women on mike at once, and much of the dialogue overlaps. Without visual cues, how to keep things clear? It helps to have a terrific cast, such as this one. Unfortunately, the director's focus on his live audience works better for them than for his audiobook listeners, who may experience moments of confusion. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Customer Reviews

The price of success
Caryl Churchill's 'Top Girls'is a play about women who have defined their roles in life according to their individual perception of womanhood. As the play opens and we see women from ages past sit around celebrating Marlene's promotion, this anomaly is lost in the dynamism of the conversation. Are these women really successful? Has Marlene really risen to become a 'top girl'? These questions are debated in the following scenes where the reader meets various women who have pursued their profession at the expense of a personal life. Marlene is no exception, as she has given up a daughter to drive across the USA and live in the 'fast lane' while her sister cared for the child. Unlike Marlene, she has given up options in life to take care of her sister's daughter and maintains the family bonds by visiting her aged mother. Marlene, however, is still the favored one by both daughter and mother; has she earned this praise?

This is not only about women and feminism. It is about labour and class, about sacrifice, and most of all, about human imperfections. I enjoyed not just reading the play, but the stimulating debates that arise out of discussions inspired by the text. It is not a traightforward contrast between right and wrong, old and modern, feminine and masculine but it examines the gray areas in between which take into account human fallacies and individual priorities.

Feminism through the ages?
I read Top Girls in my dramatic literature class in college. Reading the play can be very helpful if you plan to attend a performance. Characters are constantly interrupting each other mid-sentence and an audience can miss much of the dialouge. The concept for the play is wonderful. It examines women's lives throughout history- from Joan of Arc to women in a temp agency- all sitting down to dinner. The dialogue is exceptional and the each woman's story can fill a play in itself. However, this is definately a play you will want to see acted on stage. It's also a fun play to read/ act out loud with girlfriends because it raises many issues which concern contemporary women.

Marvelous, save the first scene.
Caryl Churchill, Top Girls (Methuen, 1982)

I almost stopped reading this play altogether at the conclusion of the first scene. I ended up glad I continued on, but really, there would have been so many better ways to handle that first scene. Putting it somewhere else in the play, for example.

Top Girls concerns Marlene, a woman just promoted to the head of her branch office of the Top Girls temp agency. She was promoted over a man, and in celebration, she imagines for herself a lavish dinner party, the guests for which are a number of notable historic women. This is understandable, and having other players in the play playing guests whose personalities are mirrored in their other roles is clever. But, really, the scene takes up an entire quarter of the play's length, and the information you get in the scene that's actually relevant to the plot is summed up in the first sentence of this paragraph. (You don't find out about the second sentence until later.) There's a lot more going on in the play's remaining four scenes, much of which is quite important, but it's shuffled off for this massive dinner party.

Once we get back into the real world, though, things get quite a bit more interesting. Marlene's niece Angie wants to run away from home and come live with Marlene, whom she sees as a great success, while Angie's mother, Joyce, is content to stay in the country eking out an existence and griping about everything possible. Angie's odd friend Kit is always hovering about in the background, being ominous. At Top Girls, life goes on, with the employees gossiping and interviewing potential workers.

The play's final four scenes are very good stuff, with all sorts of insight into their characters and action that flows through the talkiness. And in retrospect, again, the dinner party scene works within this framework, but it would probably have worked better elsewhere in the play (at the end of act one? Between the acts?). Suffer through it, though, and the play will reward you for it. ***