Top Girls: Coercion, Conflict, Desperation
ELIZABETH ALLEN
Top Girls is a play of fast and furious talk. The characters do not merely argue and contradict, they talk over each other, each pushing her own narrative, seeking to erase others. Stories are fired by pain and anger. But the moments when everyone falls silent, crushed by the inadequacy of words to meet trauma, are crucial to its impact.
From left: Chloe White, Rose White & Claire Bennett in Top Girls at the Stables Theatre
It is a play which, in its non-linear structure, makes demands on the audience. Why is the bizarre dinner party, hosted by Top Girl recruitment agency boss Marlene with guests from history and legend, followed by a disturbing scene of dysfunctional relationships between Marlene’s sister Joyce, her daughter Angie and Angie’s younger friend Kit? Jemima Bowler makes the terrorised Kit an intriguing presence.
The director’s notes say of the significance of the first scene: “We are left with a deep sense of the unresolved… The dinner guests… have no agency over their futures, that burden falls instead upon the women of the present.”
Central to the stories offered by the guests is the yearning for the lost child, for those snatched away, those murdered by war or crowd fury. And is there a lost child for Thatcherite Marlene? This loss, and what it suggests of the coercive nature of women’s choices in contemporary society, is the driver of the play.
In the third act, at the agency, the interplay of recruiters and clients ticks a lot of boxes about those choices and is played with great verve by all, some of whom are making a reappearance after the frenetic drinking of the dinner party. The final act with its clash of values between sisters Marlene (Deirdre Conneally and Karen Mann), brash and driven, and Joyce, (Hilary Derrett), exhausted but valiant in her defence of social values, is powerful. And always, onstage or marked by her absence there is Angie, played most impressively by Kelly Williams. Angie’s demanding desperation, her fleeting moments of joy, her ignorance and terror are so wonderfully embodied in the shocking shifts in pitch, and the movements of that awkward body that this is what will haunt me.
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