Caryl Churchill's Top Girls

Alicia Tycer

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780826495563
• eBook ISBN: 9781441158291
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism

Caryl Churchill is widely considered to be one of the most innovative playwrights to haveemerged in post-war British theatre. Identified as a socialist feminist writer, she is one of the few British women playwrights to have been incorporated into the dramatic canon. Top Girls is one of Churchill's most well known and often studied works, using an all female cast to critique bourgeois feminism during the Thatcher era.

1 Background and Context

This chapter provides the reader with the background information that will be useful in understanding Top Girls. First, the chapter outlines the primary reasons for the plays ongoing significance. Next, it examines Caryl Churchill’s prolific playwriting career, providing pertinent biographical details and discussing a selection of her plays, highlighting their thematic and stylistic relevance to Top Girls. Finally, the chapter looks at the social, political and historical context of Britain during the early 1980s, when the play was first performed. Particular attention is paid to exploring the socialist and feminist movements and to tracking the political career of Margaret Thatcher.

Why Top Girls is important

Caryl Churchill once wrote: ‘Playwrights don’t give answers, they ask questions.’¹ In Top Girls, one of her most significant works, Churchill asks: Is it more important to break out of a cycle of poverty and ‘make something of yourself’, or to fulfil your responsibilities to your family and community? If you are a woman, are you more likely to answer this question in a certain way? How can women balance the demands of a career and motherhood? What actually constitutes success in life? First staged in 1982, Top Girls has become emblematic of contemporary woman’s ongoing struggles with such issues.

Churchill wrote the play as a response to the election of Margaret Thatcher. Although some viewed Thatcher’s rise to political power as indicative of progress for women, Churchill worried that Thatcher’s right-wing politics benefited a minority of wealthy Britons while leaving the less fortunate behind. The play voices Churchill’s concerns regarding a societal emphasis on capitalist success over sisterly solidarity. In order to confront the era’s broad ranging political dilemmas, she compares and contrasts the lives of two sisters. Each of these women has different answers to the questions the play asks: while one sister decides to follow a path that emphasizes her career at the expense of her family life, the other maintains close familial ties but continues to lead a life of economic drudgery. Churchill avoids idealizing either path, but her portrayal presents an opportunity for her audiences to examine their opinions regarding gender and class. Furthermore, her depiction of a troubled future generation provides a poignant reminder of the importance of social responsibility.

Top Girls is renowned not only for its political commentary, but also for its stylistic innovations. As a writer, Churchill tends to use multiple experiments in style and form. In Top Girls, she establishes the principle of overlapping dialogue, a technique that has become widespread in contemporary British theatre. Furthermore, the play presents scenes out of sequential order, thereby requiring the audience to actively participate by connecting the play’s plot lines. The first act depicts a transhistorical tableau in which Marlene, an eighties’ career woman, hosts a dinner party for a table full of disparate women drawn from history, literature and art. The next two acts focus on Marlene’s career and family life during the 1980s, with the last act being set a year before the previous act. In the first production, actors were cast as both contemporary and historical characters, a precedent which subsequent productions have followed. The play’s radically non-linear narrative structure and multiple-role casting leads to the potential for multiple interpretations, encouraging viewers to compare and contrast recent and historical moments.

With Top Girls, Churchill achieved the tenuous balance of addressing feminist politics and appealing to popular audiences. Within the male-dominated theatre environment, Churchill placed women’s concerns unapologetically centre stage. Additionally, the play’s all-female cast provides opportunities for actresses to portray complex characters. While all-female productions were in vogue among feminist groups during the 1980s, few gained Top Girls’ level of popular success or critical acclaim. Indeed, theatre scholar Dimple Godiwala argues that the all-female production meant that ‘the writing of Top Girls was the single most conscious intervention that British feminist dramaturgy was to make on the patriarchal mode of dramatic discourse’ (2003, p. 8). Thus, the play was at once highly original and unusual, and is still without significant equal in the feminist or mainstream canons.

The 1982 staging at the Royal Court Theatre, directed by Max Stafford-Clark, was a landmark production. The play’s successful transferral to New York confirmed Churchill’s relevance on both sides of the Atlantic, and its widespread success helped forge a path for future women playwrights. As the newspaper critic Benedict Nightingale puts it: After Top Girls it was no longer possible to patronize “women dramatists” as some promising but lesser species of creative creature.’² Although his comment says as much about the critics’ preconceptions of women playwrights as it does about the merit of the play itself, it does indicate the crucial shift in perception that Top Girls facilitated. The play was nominated for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize and was the recipient of multiple Obie Awards, and continues to resonate with audiences, being frequently revived in professional and amateur productions worldwide.

Now considered a contemporary classic, Top Girls is included in school curricula and drama anthologies as both representing feminist theatre during the 1980s and exhibiting ongoing relevance. Mainstream publications such as Christopher Innes’ Modern British Drama (2002) as well as works examining the specifically feminist canon such as Helene Keyssar’s Feminist Theatre (1984) analyse the play’s significance. The questions the play raises contributed significantly to the ongoing process of defining feminist theatre, encouraging feminists to re-examine and engage in the process of defining their priorities. Feminist theatre scholar Lizbeth Goodman lists the play as an exemplary member of the feminist canon because of its experiments in form and the way in which it reclaims women’s voices from history. She argues that Top Girls was so effective because the play reached people outside of the feminist movement and focused public attention on concerns of real-life working women who were not being provided with adequate resources (1993, p. 227).

Top Girls is arguably even more pertinent today than when it was first produced. Indeed, scholars often consider the work prophetic, predicting much of the British class struggle of the 1980s and also the increasing disparity in wealth, which continues into the new century. In a post-feminist landscape, the play’s criticisms of hard-nosed individualism suggest possibilities for a renewed sense of political mobilization. The play continues to resonate with audiences, and emerging playwrights frequently cite the play as an inspiration. For example, Mark Ravenhill, who wrote the Royal Courts hit Shopping and Fucking, declares: ‘I read Top Girls at least once a year and I weep. One day, I think, one day I’ll write something as good.’³

Caryl Churchill’s biography

Caryl Churchill is widely considered to be one of the most innovative playwrights to have emerged in post-war British theatre. In the span of her prolific career, she has garnered both popular successes and critical respect. Indeed, Churchill is one of a select number of playwrights whose work receives acclaim from both British and international audiences. Having often worked with feminist, socialist and experimental theatre groups, she is also one of the few British women playwrights to have her plays incorporated into the dramatic canon. Churchill started writing when very few women were having plays produced professionally, and continues to write provocative works that challenge dramatic conventions.

Churchill was born in London on 3 September 1938. When she was nine, she moved with her family to Canada, where she attended the Trafalgar School, Montreal. As an only child, she enjoyed writing short stories and poems, inventing characters and attending the theatre.⁴ Churchill had a middle-class upbringing, and cites her father Robert Churchill’s work as a political cartoonist as an influence.⁵ Unlike the career woman portrayed in Top Girls, her parents raised Churchill to aspire towards both a career and motherhood. After leaving school at 14, Churchill’s mother had worked as a secretary, model and actress, and continued performing bit parts after her daughter was born. Churchill recalled that her mother ‘did talk to me about working, and the fact that she used not to wear her wedding ring to work. I had the feeling, rather early on, that having a career was in no way incompatible with staying married and being very happy.’⁶

After spending her adolescence in Canada, Churchill returned to England in 1956 to attend Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, from where she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Language and Literature and was awarded the Richard Hillary Memorial Prize. While at Oxford, she combined her interest in writing and the theatre: her plays You’ve No Need to Be Frightened and Having a Wonderful Time were staged as student productions. In 1958, her play Downstairs won first prize at the National Student Drama Festival. While still at university, Churchill had a vision of the provocative possibilities offered by the playwriting process, writing: ‘We need to find new questions which may help us answer the old ones or make them unimportant and this means new subjects and new forms.’⁷ Churchill’s dedication to continually questioning the status quo and discovering new subjects and forms has not wavered over the decades.

A degree from Oxford was an established way of entering London’s professional playwriting profession, but Churchill took a circuitous path to the stage.⁸ In 1961, she married the barrister David Harter, with whom she raised three boys. Churchill later articulated her personal struggle to balance the pull of writing with being actively involved with her children. Although she could afford a nanny, she felt conflicted about paying someone else to take care of my children, about the feeling that I could do it better’, while also feeling guilty if I did not accomplish something while I was paying someone else to baby-sit’. A key question that Churchill faced while setting her own priorities was: Are plays more important than raising kids?’⁹ She decided to act as the primary caretaker of her sons and write during any spare time.

Although the 1960s were a period of rapid upheaval and change, Churchill’s parental duties separated her from the era’s events. However, Churchill reflected that her frustrations with the domestic sphere served to interest her in politics:

I didn’t feel a part of what was happening in the sixties. During that time I felt isolated. I had small children and was having miscarriages. It was an extremely solitary life. What politicized me was being discontent with my own life of being a barrister’s wife and just being at home … It seemed claustrophobic. Having started off with undefined idealistic assumptions about the kind of life we could lead, we had drifted into something quite conventional and middle class and boring. By the mid-60s, I had this gloomy feeling that when the Revolution came I would be swept away.¹⁰

Despite time constraints, during this period Churchill wrote numerous radio plays for the BBC, starting with The Ants in 1962. Writing one-act plays for the radio allowed her more flexibility to spend time raising her sons. She had grown up listening to the radio and the genre utilized her concise ear for dialogue. The Judges Wife (1972) was her first work for television, for which she later wrote The Legion Hall Bombing (1979).

While the 1960s were a frustrating decade for Churchill, during the 1970s she found communities of like-minded artists, and her entry into the London writing world resonates with the 1970s feminist slogan ‘the personal is political’.¹¹ Thus Churchill looked back on the writing process of Owners as influenced by personal pain: ‘I wrote it in three days. I’d just come out of hospital after a particularly gruesome late miscarriage. Still quite groggy and my arm ached because they’d given me an injection that didn’t work. Into it [the play] went for the first time a lot of things that had been building up in me over a long time, political attitudes as well as personal ones.’¹² Churchill set Owners in Islington, a London suburb where she has lived since the 1960s. The play reflects the gentrification that had displaced some of the area’s poorer residents. Churchill recalled that she became motivated by her research into the area’s poor housing facilities, which coincided with her husband’s career shift away from private practice into working for a legal aid group.¹³ In Owners, Marion, the selfish real-estate developer, can be seen as a study for the central character Marlene in Top Girls.

In 1972 Owners premiered at the Royal Court, regarded as London’s premiere venue for new playwrights. Since the foundation of the English Stage Company in 1956, the Royal Court Theatre had been associated with politically leftist playwrights. Particularly with the 1965 production of Edward Bond’s Saved, the theatre became instrumental in the fight against censorship. From 1974-5 Churchill was the first female resident dramatist at the Royal Court, where she also served as tutor for the Young Writers Group. Critics have compared Churchill’s works to other feminist playwrights such as Sarah Daniels and Timberlake Wertenbaker, both of whom contributed notable works to the Royal Court’s stages during the 1980s: Wertenbaker gained popular and critical success with Our Country’s Good while Daniels’ Masterpieces provoked controversy for its examination of sexism and pornography. More recently, Churchill’s minimalist style has drawn comparisons to Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett. (Churchill’s presence has remained evident at the Royal Court Theatre through productions of new works as well as revivals, such as a series of her one-act radio plays which she directed in 2002.)

During the 1970s, Churchill became involved in political and experimental theatre groups, and in 1974, she wrote Objections to Sex and Violence, which some critics consider her first explicitly feminist work. The play depicts two bourgeois sisters, one of whom rebels to become a political terrorist. Reflecting on her evolving relationship to feminism, Churchill commented: Tor years and years I thought of myself as a writer before I thought of myself as a woman, but recently I’ve found that I would say I was a f...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• General Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Timeline
• Notes
• Further Reading
• References
• eCopyright