Naima Khan reviews Out of Joint's production of Top Girls at Trafalgar Studios.
Six female voices clamour over one another in the first act of Top Girls as women of note and power from across the centuries share a meal and attempt a to share a conversation. Few of them are actually inclined to listen to each other, but what they say is for us.
Their well timed arrivals and even better timed interruptions and introductions mean that in all this tightly choreographed chaos, we don't have to know who each of them are: their stories are eventually told through tears and shrieks, like those of concubine Lady Nijo, or a call to arms, like Gret, a Flemish folk character who invaded hell with an army of women.
The scene is an example of Caryl Churchill's poetic portrayal of politics which, above the legends and power struggles, highlights the human fallout. The dream dinner party, which is in fact the stuff of nightmares, is hosted by Marlene. Recently promoted to Managing Director of a recruitment firm, she's glamorous, cosmopolitan and thankfully not cliched in her iron strength. Her nature is caring, if cool and her misgivings and conservative politics soon come to light. Her position as a top girl allows her to believe in Thatcher's individual and is contrasted with her dutiful, worn down sister Joyce.
Scenes in Marlene's office and Joyce's country home use women to show us society in Marlene's (and Thatcher's) eyes. It's sweetly oversimplified and entertainingly conveyed through the old, the young, the pretty and the plain, each trying to find their place as an individual in a society cleaving uncontrollably.
In Max Stafford-Clark's production, we see scenes punctuated by Annie Lennox, Dolly Parton and The Jam and he makes Churchill's strengths impossible to miss. Her overlapping dialogue makes arguments realistic and her characters flit between pigeon-holes. In an extended but simple conversation between two sisters, one dutiful and one ambitious, Churchill tells a relatively uncomplex story that brings together our most persistent worries with no offer of an answer.
Image by John Haynes
Top Girls runs at Trafalgar Studios until 15th October.
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