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Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff
Thurs 4 May
As part of the Chapter Arts Centre’s Women On Stage season – a three week-long period with productions with all-female casts telling the stories of powerful women – Everyman Theatre present Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play Top Girls. The play, most well-known for its famous surreal dinner party scene, cleverly asks the audience to explore not just the issues women have faced, and continue to face, it also explores the pursuit of success and the potential dangers of individualism.
The play opened to a sold-out audience with three women being interviewed by the Top Girls employment agency. The interviewers come off as uncaring and often rude as we see the different issues that the women being interviewed have faced, including having been passed over for positions by younger less qualified men. The scene then changes to the protagonist, Marlene, holding a dinner party with historical and fictional female guests as they congratulate her on her promotion to the top job in the agency. Among them are Pope Joan, who according to legend reigned as Pope during the Middle Ages, the Japanese courtesan and nun Lady Nijo, the patient wife Griselda, the explorer Isabella Bird, and Dull Gret, the subject of a Pieter Brueghel painting.
As the evening goes on and the characters get drunker, they share their experiences with men, childbirth, and the pursuit of success. In addition to being an interesting device to explore the plight of women through the ages, with the way in which Lady Nijo and Griselda rationalise their abhorrent abuse, the characters seem to be represent parts of Marlene, who as the play goes on, we learn has left her family to pursue her success.
After the interval, we see Marlene clash with her family over everything from Thatcher to family responsibility, and with fantastic performances all round, the audience is left asking a plethora of questions. What is the price of success? What is success? Should we be afraid? Is feminism about empowering strong individual women or about enacting social changes to help disadvantaged women?
Cleverly written and well-performed, this is an important piece that holds up a mirror to modern society.
words LUKE OWAIN BOULT
Info: www.chapter.org