Top Girls

by Caryl Churchill

Overview

At a restaurant party thrown by Marlene of the Top Girls Employment Agency are Isabella Bird, the 19th-century traveller, Lady Nijo, courtesan to a 13th-century Japanese Emperor, Brueghel's Dull Gret, Pope Joan and Patient Griselda, wife of Chaucer's Clerk.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781408160855
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Publishing
Publication date:	12/30/2013
Series:	Modern Classics
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	104
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Caryl Churchill is an award-winning playwright, whose plays are renowned for their striking influence upon contemporary British theatre practices. Indicative of her enduring impression upon the theatrical landscape, Churchill has won Obie Awards for her widely celebrated plays Cloud 9 (1979), Top Girls (1982), Serious Money (1987) and A Number (2002). Further cementing her reputation as an outstanding playwright, in 2002 Churchill won an Obie Award for Lifetime Achievement and in 2010 was placed in the American Theatre Hall of Fame. She continues to produce innovative and provocative work, such as Seven Jewish Children - a play for Gaza (2009) and Love and Information (2012), and in January 2016 her latest full-length play, Escaped Alone, opened at the Royal Court Theatre to great acclaim. With an illustrious theatre career that transcends four decades, Caryl Churchill is arguably more than just one of Britain's most revered female playwrights; she is one of Britain's most respected and groundbreaking working today.

Sophie Bush is the Course Leader for the BA Performance for Stage and Screen on which she teaches across a range of modules designed to develop performance practice, research and study skills. Broadly speaking, her research and teaching interests lie in the history, practice and politics of contemporary British theatre. To date, her focus has been on the careers of female playwrights from the late 1970s to the present day. Her publications include The Theatre of Timberlake Wertenbaker (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2013); My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Edition (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016) and My Mother Said I Never Should GCSE Student Guide (Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016).

Table of Contents

Chronology (Churchill's life and work, alongside significant political, social and cultural events)

Contexts

* Historical contexts (women's rights/advancement; Thatcher's Britain)
* Theatrical contexts (The Royal Court; Max Stafford Clark; production history; critical responses)
* The play today (an interview with David Shirley, director of the play in 2014)

Themes

* Women and work
* Female Genealogy: Mothers and daughters (killing your mother; giving up your daughter); sisters (and sisterhood); 'Herstory'/re-finding women's histories
* Women's ability/freedom to occupy multiple/conflicting roles
* Women aping masculine behaviour/dress/passing as men
* 'Getting away'/freedom/travel/social mobility
* Class (individualism vs socialism; economic/social mobility; materialism vs human compassion; 'successful' women ignoring the plight of less fortunate women)

Dramatic Technique

* Language
* Structure
* Characterisation/multi-roling

Academic Debate (including suggestions for further reading)

Related Work

Play Text (with on-page glossing/notes)

Glossary of Dramatic Terms

Editorial Reviews

Top Girls has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind.” —Sunday Times

“Ms. Churchill is one of the best writers...her play is brilliantly conceived with considerable wit to illuminate the underlying deep human seriousness of her theme.” —Spectator

“A dramatist who must surely be rated among the half-dozen best now writing a playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting.” —New Statesman

From the Publisher

A dramatist who must surely be rated among the half-dozen best now writing a playwright of genuine audacity and assurance, able to use her considerable wit and intelligence in ways at once unusual, resonant and dramatically riveting.

New Statesman

Ms. Churchill is one of the best writers...her play is brilliantly conceived with considerable wit to illuminate the underlying deep human seriousness of her theme.

Spectator

Top Girls has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind.

Sunday Times

Top Girls has a combination of directness and complexity which keeps you both emotionally and intellectually alert. You can smell life, and at the same time feel locked in an argument with an agile and passionate mind.

The Sunday Times

When the curtain rises, Marlene has just gotten a promotion and is celebrating with a group of overachieving women of history. Next comes a montage of her at the employment agency where she works. Finally, comes a tense reunion with her sister and the daughter Marlene abandoned. This celebrated allegorical stage play of 1982 presents several difficulties for the audio producer. It requires eight women on mike at once, and much of the dialogue overlaps. Without visual cues, how to keep things clear? It helps to have a terrific cast, such as this one. Unfortunately, the director’s focus on his live audience works better for them than for his audiobook listeners, who may experience moments of confusion. Y.R. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

FEB/MAR 07 - AudioFile