Review: Top Girls, People’s Theatre, Newcastle
Caryl Churchill’s play recalls history’s forgotten women
You know the parlour game where someone names the guests, living or dead, who they’d invite to a dinner party?
That’s what Marlene has done to celebrate her promotion to managing director and we, the audience, sit facing each other across the restaurant table ahead of their arrival.
In they come, one by one, and to say they’re a rum bunch would be an understatement. They certainly sent me on a Google search afterwards because I hadn’t heard of any of them.
Here’s Lady Nijo (Rye Mattick), not to take her place but to waft around in her kimono, explaining how, many moons ago, her father gave her to the Emperor of Japan as a concubine and he had her children taken away.
He was perfectly entitled to do so, insists garrulous Lady Nijo, saucer eyed. She was, after all, his possession.
This even before the starters have been served by the increasingly exasperated waitress.
Isabella Bird (Moira Valentine) relates her escapades as Victorian traveller extraordinaire, Pope Joan (Anna Dobson given a rare chance to don a mitre and be sick in it) recalls her ill-fated tenure while a lady called Dull Gret (Sarah McLane), who was painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder leading a raid on Hell, blurts out “pig” and “cock”.
The latecomer is Patient Griselda (Martha Harmer) whose devotion was tested by the passing nobleman who’d married her on a whim and then pretended to have their children killed. When she patiently stuck by him he rewarded her by taking up with a younger woman.
Such are the abuses and indignities women have suffered throughout history.
And here we are now in the present, or the present being the late 1970s/early ’80s when Caryl Churchill wrote her best known play, with Marlene (Sara Jo Harrison) celebrating her promotion in what was still – despite Maggie Thatcher’s recent election as PM – a man’s world.
Churchill was and is an experimenter, playing around with theatrical norms and audience expectations. Not for her a simple narrative with beginning, middle and end. Rather, food for thought served up in episodic fashion with gasps and laughs along the way.
Thus the act one diners talk over and often ignore each other, sometimes addressing us directly as others tell their stories.
Then, when they’ve drained their goblets and drifted back into myth and history, we have before us two teenage girls arguing furiously and one vowing to kill her mother.
They’ll turn up again later, Angie (Myah Rose Wilson) and Kit (Zoe Brissenden Lang), the former in the very next act set in the Top Girls employment agency where Marlene and her colleagues – well, underlings as of now – interview a succession of female job seekers.
Plenty of oblique insights here into the patriarchal world of work. And there are some unscheduled interruptions, Angie first and then the wife of the man who didn’t get the job to which he felt entitled.
Then to the finale, a grand and escalating ‘domestic’ in which ‘Aunty’ Marlene turns up with gifts for Angie and rows furiously over the whisky with sister Joyce (Kay Edmundson) about choices made.
Career girl Marlene comes out drunkenly and uncertainly for Thatcher; Joyce, left at home to pick up the pieces while her sister swanned off, will have none of it. It’s raw, awkward, visceral, rising to a crescendo of recriminations.
Brilliantly performed, though, as is all of it, with special mention perhaps for Harrison’s Marlene, growing uncomfortably aware of the price paid for trailblazing, Edmundson, quietly seething as Joyce, and Wilson as the irrepressible yet volatile Angie.
As befits a famous feminist play, an all-female case is directed by Kath Frazer and Sue Hinton. Hats off to all of them for a classy and memorable addition to the People’s repertoire.
Top Girls runs in the People’s Theatre Studio until Saturday, February 15. Tickets from the theatre website.