Photo by David Cooper
Top Girls
Not long ago, I met a university student who very confidently declared, “I like Stephen Harper.” “And why is that?” I asked, incredulous. “Because he gets things done,” was his answer. “And at what human cost?” was my next question, but he didn’t seem to understand my meaning and this time he had no answer. He was a business student, wired no doubt for the “excellence” promised by universities hustling potential graduates nowadays for the corporate world. He seemed intent on quickly climbing a ladder to a career and had no time for either introspection or for human lives discounted in a culture whose ethos is financial gain. I thought about this student while watching Caryl Churchill’s brilliant play Top Girls at the Shaw Festival recently and realized how very relevant a play it still is.
Top Girls, from 1982, is a product of the Thatcher era in Britain, a time when a Conservative government was geared to “get things done.” As such, we have Marlene, now newly appointed as a managerial director at an employment agency, who soon declares “I hate the working class,” the very class from which she came. Her cost, we later find, is the loss of her daughter. Indeed, the theme of maternal loss of one’s babes is established by a remarkably-conceived opening scene, one during which we meet five other women selected from history, art, or culture.
These women too were compelled to give up their young children, their own flesh and blood. They include the legendary “Pope Joan,” a thirteenth century Japanese concubine, Isabella Bird who was “the first woman to address the Royal Geographical Society,” Dull Gret from Bruegel’s painting “Dulle Griet Leading an Army of Women to Pillage Hell,” and Patient Griselda who, as verification of her obedience to her husband, gave up two of their children.
This opening scene is gut-wrenchingly potent with its emotional complexity deftly realized by an incisively able cast. We have Claire Jullien as Pope Joan, the one who gave birth during a papal procession, played with invigorating and unwavering bite into her character, plight and all. There’s Lady Nijo of Julia Course, serene and evocatively understated as some of the women in Kenji Mizoguchi’s films. Isabella Bird is played by Catherine McGregor as dynamically poised and fiercely proper, while Laurie Paton’s Dull Gret is defiantly crude and blunt and unbending as she stuffs food into both her mouth and her bag. Meanwhile, Tara Rosling’s Patient Griselda seems the womanly embodiment of sky-infused earth.
The accounts of children taken and murdered, from all five, are deeply touching and, as Lady Nijo declares, “Nobody ever gave me back my children.” She also describes how women were beaten so they would deliver sons. Meanwhile, Fiona Byrne’s Marlene, the one who imagines and hosts this gathering, reveals an underpinning of wistful psychological need, even as she enjoys her authority over the waitress played distinctly herself and quite present by Tess Benger.
There is much overlapping chatter here as these women bounce emotionally off one another and gradually touch our hearts and make us compassionate to the wounds of their painful lives. This chatter, sometimes impressionistically-delivered as vague sounds and sometimes stiletto-precise, gets cut off often by a listener being distracted by another speaker seeking a new set of ears. The implied indifference to a woman speaking from her guts is subtly obvious for us to hear.
We pay close attention to the experience of five figures from the past, accounts of women suffering brutality at the hands of a patriarchal culture that always called the shots. We see the bottom side of male domination with its humiliation and dehumanization of women. But take us up to today, still with its unfeeling attitudes to human dignity, and we find that sisterhood does not yet prevail, that compassion for one’s fellow woman is not the norm.
If we are told that “men are such bullshitters,” we are also shown often in this production that women can be mean shits. Take this encounter: a female employment counsellor interviews a 46 year old woman who has “spent 20 years in middle management.” The latter, played by Tara Rosling, now sees young men she has trained rising above her in position. She notes, however, “I don’t care for working with women” and then, as a sign of her worth, adds, “I don’t drink.” To this, the counsellor, played by Claire Jullien, declares with a dismissive iciness that is quite palpable, “Good for you” and we sense now a war of generations within the ranks of women.
When Howard’s wife, played with exquisite shadings of feeling by Laurie Paton, comes to see Marlene who has won a position coveted by Howard, she explains that her husband will have a hard time “working for a woman.” She implies a need of special consideration for “a man of Howard’s age,” and even that Marlene should step aside for the male to take her new position. Howard’s wife soon deems the uncompliant Marlene as a “ballbreaker” since her own survival requires that she stand by her man and the patriarchal system, woman-suppressive as it is, of which he is a part.
At one point, two women in conversation each declare, “I’m not very nice” and indeed we see women at war with one another throughout Churchill’s uncompromising play. Young teen Angie declares to younger friend Kit, played by Tess Benger with an easy precision that is most believable, that she wants to “kill” her mother. We see a love-hate connection between the two friends – and between mother and daughter, when the former declares, “You fucking little cunt, you can stay there and die.”
Later, when two colleagues of Marlene congratulate her on her new position, their “We are happy for you” reeks of insincerity. When Marlene observes Angie, she declares, “She’s not going to make it,” and does so not with maternal concern but with bureaucratic dismissiveness. Love-hate is also the norm when the two sisters, Marlene who is now getting things done in the Thatcher world and Joyce who remains defiantly working class, have it out. Here we have not only longstanding familial animosities, but political ones too, in this confrontation. It is a tense scene full of rich emotional human fibre. We discover that terms like feminism and class struggle indeed have a very human dimension, one that might get lost in university seminars that ponder the past.
This Shaw Festival production is often gripping theatre. We have a variety of intriguing characters, implicit dramatic issues that no matter the tension cannot be resolved, potent interactions of all kinds, a first act that is one of the most theatrical and heart-provoking in the dramatic canon, a cast of sometimes inspired performances, and relevance for today without question. We have a play, though in something of a distracting production of it, that shows how the best way to comprehend an era is by understanding the lives who live it, the lives who interact with others in a similarly trying or quite different situations.
Two issues, then. Director Vikki Anderson’s decision to have these women at dressing tables and getting into both makeup and character –yes, we ‘get it’ that women have been forced to play roles in male-dominated societies – feels unnecessarily gimmicky. It’s as if directorial concept wants to prevail over the playwright’s passionate, evocative, and humanly precise writing for these characters.
Equally distracting is the very loud blast from the past soundtrack of golden oldies which, with their blunt familiarity, are much an intrusion into Churchill’s engaging subtleties of characters whom we slowly come to understand. Why would one use such devices and force the play to be dramatically removed from our lives and even turn it into an artefact from the past? Plays from any past that have the guts to face their time will always be a relevant inspiration for us to face ours.