The Shaw Festival triumphs with a provocative Top Girls
Photo: David Cooper.
NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, Ont. — There’s no doubt about it. The Shaw Festival’s new production of Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls is a dazzler of a show — provocative, invigorating, hilarious, heart-wrenching. It allows us to feast on a seemingly effortless display of stunning ensemble acting that deserves a triple underlining in the memory books.
The show that made a triumphant arrival at the Court House Theatre Saturday night can claim any number of attention-grabbing sequences, thanks to Vikki Anderson’s incisive direction and the astonishing work of her seven-member cast, almost all of them in a variety of roles. But there’s a particularly pivotal scene involving Marlene, a woman obsessed with proving that women can be a success in business and ruthless in her determination to claw her way to power within the Top Girls Employment Agency.
A pathetically gauche and immature teenager named Angie has penetrated the inner sanctum of Marlene’s London office, in breathless anticipation of getting a job there. It’s not going to happen, of course, even though Marlene is the successful aunt whom Angie idealizes — and the antithesis of the mother she hates. But there’s a compelling but unsettling chemistry happening in the encounter: on the one hand, we have actress Julia Course’s extraordinary entry into the floundering, unpredictable psyche of this patently troubled adolescent; on the other hand, we have Fiona Byrne’s flint-hearted Marlene, a woman who fears loss of control more than anything else now she’s reached the top, yet in this instance at something of an impasse over the arrival of this unpredictable child.
These moments are among the best in the production, reflecting the playwright’s skill with uneasy, undefinable bits of subtext. There’s something going on here — but what exactly? We already know that the discontented Angie indulges in homicidal musings about murdering the mother she can’t stand. And we ourselves will understand a lot more when Churchill’s non-linear script reaches its climax with a tense, revelatory confrontation between the two sisters — Marlene and Joyce — that took place a year previously. But before that happens there’s that telling moment, earlier in the play but later in time, when Angie’s departure from the office has restored the steely equilibrium so necessary to Marlene’s well-being. And now she is able to pronounce on this difficult child’s prospects. “She’s not going to make it,” Marlene says pragmatically — and in this moment it’s almost as if Byrne, a consummate actress, is plunging an icicle through her own character’s already chilly heart.
Byrne will also be reminding us that Marlene is more vulnerable emotionally than she lets on — that the arrival of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government carries a hidden canker that can affect even someone as relentlessly ambitious and devoted to feminist ideology as herself. Caryl Churchill’s 1982 play is in one sense an embittered lament for the betrayal of feminism that Thatcherism represented. But in another sense, it is an indictment of a culture that benefits the few at the expense of the many. In this production, the two threads converge dramatically at the end in that searing encounter between Marlene, a woman who has seemingly made it to the top, and an outstanding Tara Rosling as her sister Joyce — a drab, grey figure beaten down by the system but still capable of unbridled fury when she compares her life of drudgery with the shiny privileged world represented by Marlene.
However, it’s not the edgy naturalism of such scenes that first won attention for Top Girls. It was the audacity of the opening sequence — a surrealistic fantasy that sees Marlene celebrating her elevation to the post of managing director at the agency by throwing a dinner party at a posh London restaurant with her invited guests turning out to be unusual women from history and mythology.
Here, the booze flows along with the personal revelations and the increasingly maudlin chatter. The script demands a sort of tapestry of sound here: Max Stafford-Clark, the play’s original director, indulged Churchill in her penchant for overlapping dialogue and abrupt non sequiturs and a growing atmosphere of emotional and verbal chaos. There’s an element of one upmanship here: each of these woman has her own story to tell and is unwilling to yield to any other narrative.
It’s a challenging scene to stage and a difficult one to act because it is essentially an intricate piece of dramatic orchestration. It’s in constant danger of becoming no more than a blur of sound. Yet, at the Shaw, certain essential threads do emerge — perhaps most significantly, a series of variations on the tragedy of childbearing — and they will be intertwining with present-day characters in the main body of the play. And amidst the cacophony of this scene, one telling sentence does surface: “Why are we all so miserable?”
It’s legitimate to suggest that Churchill may be demanding too much of audience members with this sequence, despite its cult reputation. By the time it ends, many viewers will still be trying to figure out who these figures from the past are supposed to be. Churchill herself details their provenance in the actual text of her play. The Shaw Festival would have been wise to provide a useful anchor in the form of some sort of descriptive glossary in its printed program. So, briefly and for the record, here is who they are: Pope Joan who reputedly achieved the papal chair disguised as a man; Griselda, the obedient spouse in Chaucer’s The Clerk’s Tale; Isabella Bird, a Victorian adventurer; Lady Nijo, a 13th Century Japanese courtesan; Dull Gret, a heroic figure from a Breughel painting.
Top Girls touches a variety of bases — politics, capitalism, feminist values, to name the most obvious — but it is fundamentally a moral treatise. And this production offers a pleasurable succession of memorable moments.
There’s Claire Jullien’s Pope Joan trying to curb her emotions as she recalls her death by stoning after giving birth to a child during a papal procession.
There’s Laurie Paton’s hilarious Dull Gret brazenly shovelling the dinner rolls and fancy silverware into a copious bag and punctuating the clamour of conversation with a few choice expletives.
There’s Laurie Paton again as Mrs. Kidd, a drab and dutiful wife who has come to the agency to protest the fact that Marlene has been elevated to a position that should have gone to her husband because he is a man — and what right does Marlene have to be doing a man’s job anyway? Marlene, finally losing control, tells Mrs. Kidd to “piss off.”
There’s a particularly unsettling scene where agency staffer Win (Claire Jullien, again excellent) is interviewing 46-year-old Louise. The latter, beautifully played by Tara Rosling, has spent most of her working life at the same firm and become fed up with being constantly being passed over for promotion in favour of males who have trained under her. It’s one of the saddest moments in the play because of the implication that Louise is no longer employable.
And then there’s a revealing moment when Catherine McGregor, whom we have already met as a formidable Isabella Bird, is conducting an agency interview with an outwardly impressive young candidate named Shona, ably portrayed by Claire Jullien, only to realize she’s dealing with an inveterate liar. The irony here is that Shona seems such a plausible product of the reigning culture.
Finally, we mustn’t forget Tess Benger’s uncanny skill in persuasively entering the character of the troubled Angie’s 12-year-old playmate — or the evening’s gleaming, edgy look, for which we must thank that ever-dependable designer, Sue LePage.
(Top Girls runs at the Shaw Festival until Sept. 12. Ticket information at 1 800 511 SHAW or shawfest.com)