Unit 2: Caryl Churchill: Top Girls

I. Orientation: the play and its moment

Top Girls (premiered 28 August 1982, Royal Court Theatre, London; directed by Max Stafford-Clark for Joint Stock/Royal Court) is the central text of British political theatre's response to the first Thatcher government. Written after Margaret Thatcher's election as Britain's first woman Prime Minister (May 1979) and after Churchill's visit to the United States, it asks whether a woman's arrival at the top constitutes a feminist victory.

• Genre: episodic political comedy-drama in three acts, mixing surreal fantasy (Act One) with social realism (Acts Two–Three).
• Cast: sixteen speaking roles written for seven actresses; no male character appears on stage, though men are constantly spoken about (Howard Kidd, Marlene's father, Joyce's husband Frank).
• Setting: London and rural Suffolk, 1980–81; the "Top Girls" Employment Agency, Joyce's back yard and kitchen, a restaurant.
• Governing opposition: individual advancement versus collective solidarity; "top girl" versus the women left behind.
• Political frame: Churchill's declared socialist feminism, against both patriarchy and the capitalist class system that a Thatcherite feminism leaves untouched.

II. Biography of Caryl Churchill

Formation of a socialist-feminist dramatist

A. Life and formation

Churchill's early experience of two cultures and of Oxbridge-educated privilege underlies her interest in class as well as gender.

• Birth and childhood: born 3 September 1938 in London; father a political cartoonist, mother a model, secretary and film actress; the family emigrated to Montreal in 1948, where she completed her schooling.
• Education: read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (1957–60); student productions of Downstairs (1958) and Having a Wonderful Time began her career.
• Domestic life: married the barrister David Harter in 1961; three sons. The years of small-children domesticity produced radio plays for the BBC — The Ants (1962), Identical Twins, Abortive — written at home in short bursts.
• Politics: her husband's abandonment of commercial law for legal aid work, and the couple's involvement in anti-Vietnam and left politics in the late 1960s, sharpened the anti-capitalist commitment visible in Owners onwards. She has consistently refused state honours.

B. Theatrical apprenticeship and collaborations

Churchill's method is inseparable from the collective, workshop-based companies she wrote for.

• Royal Court: first professional stage play Owners (1972, Theatre Upstairs); resident dramatist 1974–75.
• Joint Stock Theatre Group: Light Shining in Buckinghamshire (1976), Cloud Nine (1979), Fen (1983) — devised through actor-led research workshops, which explains the documentary texture of the interview scenes in Top Girls.
• Monstrous Regiment: the feminist company for which she wrote Vinegar Tom (1976), on witch-hunting as the persecution of poor women.
• Later career: Serious Money (1987, City of London deregulation, written in rhyming couplets), Mad Forest (1990), The Skriker (1994), Far Away (2000), A Number (2002), Love and Information (2012), Escaped Alone (2016) — a continuous experiment with form rather than a settled style.

III. Thematic and plot analysis

A. Plot synopsis

The three acts are deliberately out of sequence: Act Three occurs a year before Acts One and Two.

• Act One — the dinner party: Marlene hosts a restaurant celebration for her promotion to managing director of the Top Girls Employment Agency. The guests are dead or fictional women: Isabella Bird (1831–1904, Victorian traveller), Lady Nijō (thirteenth-century Japanese imperial concubine turned Buddhist nun), Dull Gret (from Bruegel's painting Dulle Griet, who leads women to raid hell), Pope Joan (legendary ninth-century female pope, stoned to death after giving birth in procession) and Patient Griselda (from Chaucer's Clerk's Tale). Talk of achievement dissolves into stories of lost, surrendered or murdered children; the Waitress serves in silence.
• Act Two, Scene One: Marlene interviews the timid Jeanine, advising her to hide her engagement ring and her plans to marry.
• Act Two, Scene Two: Joyce's back yard in Suffolk. Angie, sixteen, and her younger friend Kit; Angie half-plans to kill her mother with a brick, and announces she is going to London.
• Act Two, Scene Three: the agency. Angie arrives uninvited; Mrs Kidd begs Marlene to refuse the job because her husband Howard, passed over, is humiliated; Win interviews Louise (46, invisible after 21 years' service) and Nell interviews Shona, who fabricates an entire sales career. Marlene's verdict on her daughter: "She's not going to make it."
• Act Three: a year earlier, Joyce's kitchen. The sisters quarrel over Marlene's abandonment of Angie — Joyce has raised her — over their father, and over Thatcher. The play ends with Angie's single word, "Frightening."

B. Thematic analysis

Each theme is dramatised as a cost rather than stated as a message.

• Success and its price: every Act One guest has paid in children (Nijō's children given away, Joan's baby killed with her, Griselda's children taken by Walter, Isabella's childlessness); Marlene pays with Angie.
• Motherhood as the fault-line of female achievement: the play's structure conceals Angie's parentage until Act Three, so that the audience judges Marlene's careerism before it knows the price.
• Class: "I don't believe in class," says Marlene; Joyce, who cleans four houses, has the sisters' father's alcoholism and early death as counter-evidence.
• Sisterhood versus competition: Nell and Win compete for the job Marlene won; Mrs Kidd attacks Marlene as "unnatural"; solidarity exists only between Joyce and Angie, and it is exhausted.
• The future: Marlene's "I think the eighties are going to be stupendous" is answered by Angie's "Frightening" — the same decade seen from the top and the bottom.

C. Structure and chronology

The reversed final act converts information into judgement.

• Retrospective irony: knowing in Act Three that Angie is Marlene's daughter retrospectively poisons Act Two's "She's a bit thick."
• Circularity: the play ends where its emotional logic begins, refusing the linear progress narrative that Marlene's career embodies.
• Act One as choric prologue: the historical women supply the pattern (obedience, disguise, endurance, violence) that the modern women repeat.

IV. Character analysis

A. Marlene and Joyce

The sisters are the play's structural antithesis; a single family, two class destinies.

1. Marlene: self-made managing director; changed her name in effect by leaving Suffolk; celebrates Thatcher ("Certainly gets my vote"); refuses class analysis and calls the working class "lazy and stupid"; admires "monetarism" without understanding it; her feminism is entry to a hierarchy, not its dismantling.
2. Joyce: stayed, married, miscarried, cleans houses; class-conscious and unromantic about her mother's "wasted life"; her line "What good's first woman if it's her?" is the play's political hinge; she is stubborn, cruel and morally right.

B. Angie

Angie embodies everyone the meritocracy discards.

• Diagnosis by the agency: "She's not going to make it" — the play's most chilling professional judgement, delivered by her own mother.
• Doubling with Dull Gret: her Act One counterpart is the mute, apocalyptic warrior; Angie's brick, her fantasy of killing Joyce, and her final "Frightening" carry Gret's inarticulate rage into 1982.
• Dramatic function: she cannot be assimilated into either sister's argument, and so exposes both.

C. The working women and the historical guests

Minor roles are structural, not decorative.

• Win and Nell: hard, jokey agency "high-flyers"; Win's married lover and her prison-visiting past show costs concealed by banter.
• Jeanine, Louise, Shona: the three faces of female employment — the young woman told to hide marriage plans, the middle-aged woman made invisible, the young woman who wins only by lying.
• Mrs Kidd: the wife whose status is entirely her husband's; polices Marlene on patriarchy's behalf.
• Isabella, Nijō, Joan, Griselda, Gret: respectively escape, submission, disguise, obedience and revolt — five historical strategies, all requiring self-mutilation.

V. Significance of the title

The title is a piece of ironic corporate branding.

• Literal referent: the "Top Girls" Employment Agency, whose business is placing women in jobs largely below their capacity.
• "Girls": infantilising diminutive for adult professional women — the language of the workplace it satirises; note the guests are also "girls" at Marlene's party.
• "Top": presupposes a pyramid; if some women are on top, others (Joyce, Angie, the silent Waitress) must be beneath them.
• Ironic scope: Marlene, Thatcher and the Act One guests are all "top girls" who succeeded individually; the title names the ideology the play dismantles rather than the heroines it celebrates.

VI. Stylistic devices

A. Overlapping dialogue

Churchill's most influential technical innovation, prefaced by a note on the text's notation.

/   marks the point at which the next speaker interrupts
*   marks a speech that follows on from an earlier interrupted speech

• Effect in Act One: stories of suffering compete and cancel each other; nobody listens, which is the scene's argument about female solidarity.
• Naturalistic warrant: the technique reproduces real conversational overlap while denying the audience any single authoritative voice.

B. Doubling

Seven actresses play sixteen parts, so the casting itself makes an argument.

• Original scheme: Isabella/Joyce/Mrs Kidd; Nijō/Win; Gret/Angie; Joan/Louise; Griselda/Nell/Jeanine; Waitress/Kit/Shona.
• Marlene alone is undoubled: the individualist has no historical double — she carries the play's isolation formally.

C. Non-linear structure and Brechtian technique

The play refuses catharsis and identification.

• Episodic acts that could be discussed separately (Trennung der Elemente), plus a reversed chronology that turns Act Three into commentary.
• Historicisation: Act One's dead women make gender oppression visible as history, not nature.
• Anachronism and magic realism: Pope Joan reciting Latin, Gret's demons and Isabella's Rocky Mountains share a restaurant table with a 1982 promotion dinner.
• Monologue: Gret's "Big mouth" hell-raid speech and Joan's account of her exposure break the naturalistic surface.

D. Language and register

Idiolect does the class analysis.

• Marlene: clipped office idiom — "she's got a lot of experience", "monetarism".
• Joyce and Angie: Suffolk dialect, unfinished sentences, silence.
• Comic surface: the agency's jokes are a defence against the brutality of what is being transacted.

VII. Sexual politics

Taking Kate Millett's sense (Sexual Politics, 1970) of power relations between the sexes, the play shows those relations reproduced between women.

• Sexuality as currency: Nijō is given to the Emperor at fourteen and beaten in ritual; Griselda accepts Walter's tests as marital duty; Joan can hold power only while sexless and disguised.
• Marriage as career hazard: Marlene advises Jeanine to conceal her engagement — women must choose between reproduction and promotion.
• Male absence, male power: Howard Kidd's heart attack, his wife's plea, the absent fathers of Angie and of the sisters — men structure every scene without appearing.
• Women policing women: Mrs Kidd and Marlene's own dismissal of Angie show that patriarchal norms need no male enforcer.
• The masculinised woman: Marlene succeeds by adopting the aggression, monetarism and emotional evasion of the men she replaced — "adjustment", not liberation.

VIII. Socialist feminism

Churchill's position is that gender liberation without class transformation simply reallocates places in the hierarchy.

• Two feminisms opposed:
  1. Bourgeois/liberal: Marlene and Thatcher — equal access to existing structures, individual success, meritocratic self-help.
  2. Socialist: Joyce's implicit position — oppression is jointly produced by patriarchy and capitalism; one woman's rise depends on other women's unpaid or low-paid labour (Joyce's cleaning, her care of Angie).
• The Thatcher test: Joyce's retort that a first woman leader is worthless if her politics are "Hitler"-like exposes the emptiness of representation as a criterion.
• Origin of the argument: Churchill has explained that the play arose from encountering an American feminism content with individual achievement inside capitalism, and from Britain's own version of it after 1979.
• Form as politics: all-female casting, doubling and collective authorship practices enact the collectivity the play's content finds missing.
• Refusal of a positive heroine: the play offers no model woman; the socialist-feminist argument is made negatively, through Angie's wasted intelligence and the closing word "Frightening."