Dr. Mari Kathleen Fielder has provided the following excellent dramaturgical notes to enhance your experience of this weekend’s production of TOP GIRLS. A condensed version of these notes appears in the TOP GIRLS program. Click here to get tickets for TOP GIRLS.

“She’s a bit thick – a bit funny.  She’s not going to make it.”

Such is the cold indictment that our top Top Girl, Marlene, makes of her abandoned, mentally-challenged daughter.  Like so many Top Girls, Marlene assesses the ability to “make it” not only by male success standards, but also by those of the controlling capitalist class.  Those without the sanctioned appearance, education, ambition and self-promotion: relegated at one glance to the social junk heap.  They, in Marlene’s words, are “lazy and stupid.”  In this life, they get what they deserve.  Nothing.

London-born playwright Caryl Churchill wrote Top Girls in 1982, just as Britain was acclimating itself to its first female Prime Minister - - it’s first, if you will, Top Girl.  Churchill, born in 1938, began playwriting while at Oxford in the 1950’s.  She came of age during Britain’s great decline, its economy shattered by the World War and then the collapse of the colonial empire.  Business nationalization and social security programs seemed reasonable mitigators.  The plight of the working class dominated the era’s drama: gritty, realistic sagas about entrapment and frustration known as the Anger Movement.  Socialist solutions dominated.  Joan Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop particularly championed the Epic Theatre methods of Communist East German theatre maker and theoretician Bertolt Brecht.  Brecht, famously, had rejected the way in which “dramatic theatre,” with its suspense-filled well-made play formula and its empathetic protagonist, lured its audience to a predetermined resolution.  To Brecht, this was not unlike the ruling class leading their workers to share the rulers’ self-serving vision of how society should function.  Brecht upheld instead “epic theatre,” a non-linear theatre that forced viewers to arrive at their own conclusions.  Optimally, this conclusion would include the impetus to take much-needed social action in the real world.

Churchill’s plays unite all of these impulses with a hefty dose of feminism.  In the wake of the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement, feminists all over the Western world found renewed energy in interpreting the Civil Rights Act’s ban on racial discrimination to extend to gender discrimination as well.  By the 1970’s, however, the feminist movement splintered.  Liberal feminists focused on the rights of women as individuals, notably their rights to equal pay and reproductive freedom.  Conversely, radical feminists aligned themselves with revolutionary, often pro-Marxist groups, viewing women as a disenfranchised class.  Churchill ascribed to the latter, as was the preference amongst the British intelligentsia.

Ironically, however, when the archly conservative Margaret Thatcher cracked the pink ceiling and became Prime Minister, British feminists shuddered.  A woman finally was at the helm.  It was a dream come true.  Except Maggie Thatcher stood for everything feminists hated.  It is no coincidence that Churchill named her main character Marlene, a name close in sound to Margaret.  It is no coincidence that Marlene, like Maggie Thatcher, exhibits a pronounced Darwinist bent, seeing humans as betters and lessers, winners and losers.  Maggie Thatcher was nicknamed the Iron Lady, first for her tough anti-Communist rhetoric but later for her cold, individualist world view.  In practice, this translated into her cutting government power (especially its tax base), weakening trade unions, suppressing immigrants, and slashing nearly every social service, education and housing program designed to soften the blows of Britain’s economic decline for the most vulnerable.  Another nickname: “Maggie Thatcher, Milk Snatcher,” for the abolition of free milk for British school children.

And it is no coincidence that Top Girls opens with Marlene celebrating her promotion to top executive in an employment agency (unemployment being one of Britain’s most stubborn social ills, deemed responsible for everything from skyrocketing drug abuse to family breakdown).  Marlene celebrates with selected Top Girls from factual history and fantasized fiction.  The girls fall into distinct categories.  First: the free spirits, unbound by patriarchy’s insistence on family duty.  Lady Isabella Bird, Victorian world traveler and travel writer, has much in common with Marlene.  Both did not marry young in order to pursue careers.  Both had guilt-ridden relationships with their traditional sisters.  Another free spirit, the mediaeval Pope Joan began dressing as a boy at age twelve so that she could continue her education but then lived her entire public life as a man.  She took male lovers in private and became pregnant, delivering her baby during a papal procession.  For this, she was stoned to death.  Joan connects to Marlene in her male-adopted persona and her illegitimate child. 

Next category: women who famously knuckled under to men.  Lady Nijo, a thirteenth-century Japanese concubine, situates here.  Eventually, Nijo traded the concubine’s kimono for ascetic Buddhist nun’s garb.  Yet she longs, always, for her former extravagant material life: her clothes, their colors, their textures, which she values far more than independence or intelligence.  In this category, too, is Patient Griselda, a fictional character from mediaeval poet Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” (one of the Canterbury Tales).  Patient Griselda is a nearly allegorical representation of female docility, going so far as to defend her husband’s murder of both of her children to test her obedience.

Dull Gret, the remaining partygoer, is an anomaly.  She is a character from Flemish folklore given striking physical form by painter Pieter Brueghel the Elder.  Titled “Dulle Griet,” the 1562 painting shows her leading a mob of women into Hell, dressed in dual-gender costume.  She wears, on one hand, a serving woman’s apron.  On the other, she bears the accoutrements of male aggression: helmet, sword, armor, a basket filled with gold booty.  She resembles a Barbarian in speech: monosyllabic crude grunts, the hallmarks of a [wo] man of few words.

Influenced by Brecht, Churchill eschews suspenseful plotting in favor of an episodic approach to this play, juxtaposing two radically discontinuous theatrical worlds.  The extraordinary fantasy of the dinner party contrasts sharply with the ordinary - - even boring - - spheres of work and home.  Churchill further displaces time, with Act II occurring one year after Act III.  The play is meant to thwart expectations, to disrupt consciousness.  Churchill wants her audience, in Brecht’s words, to have their “eyes on the course,” not “on the finish.”  By not making explicit the connections between disparate elements, Top Girls opens a space of interrogation for the audience, a place where new meanings can be revealed.  Patterns emerge, then a general picture.

Top Girl’s general picture ultimately chills.  Explained Churchill: 

What I was intending to do was make it look as though it was celebrating the achievements of women; then - - by showing the main character Marlene being successful in a very competitive, destructive, capitalist way - - ask, what kind of achievement is that?

One clear pattern: the characters leave on - - and leave us with - - a moment of undefined terror.  The Victorian Lady Isabella Bird somehow fears her black stallion.  Ninth-century Pope Joan, barely able to articulate, is scared witless by something to do with light, with breasts, with death.  More than a thousand years later, terror permeates still for the future generation of contemporary English women.  One thing is clear.  When women try to rise, try to push back against patriarchy or simply try to join it, the repercussions - - always, staggeringly - - are frightful.