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by Caryl Churchill, directed by Alisa Palmer

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

October 25-November 22, 2008

Soulpepper couldn’t have known when it decided to revive its successful production of Top Girls that the US election would give the play a peculiar relevance.  Written as a critique of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain in 1982, Caryl Churchill’s play has a character refer to the Iron Lady as “Hitlerina,” while now south of the border critics of Sarah Palin refer to her as “Cheney in a dress.”  What really has been achieved, Churchill asks, if women who gain power simply act like men in upholding a socially stratified society?                 

The play begins with a dinner party celebrating the rise of Marlene (Megan Follows) over a male colleague to become Managing Director of an employment agency.  Marlene’s guests include celebrated historical and fictional women from various places and times.  While Marlene’s view of success is to take a man’s place at the top of a command pyramid, the variety of experience of her five guests suggests there are many alternate ways than material success to being a “top girl.”  Churchill indictment of hierarchy is reflected in the play’s non-chronological ordering of its scenes.  Job interviews at Marlene’s agency with overqualified to pathetic applicants alternate with scenes involving Marlene’s older sister Joyce (Kelli Fox) and her rebellious but slow-witted daughter Angie (Liisa Repo-Martell).  A disturbing climax reveals what price Marlene made others pay to win her freedom to achieve success and casts a bitter irony in retrospect over all that has come before.  

The entire extraordinarily talented cast of last year has been reassembled for this remount.  Again Follows’s performance gradually reveals the brittleness of Marlene’s façade and the hollowness of her life.  Fox amazes again with her performance of three utterly different characters.  Repo-Martell is, if anything, even more intense in her roles than before.  Diana Donnelly, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Cara Pifko and Robyn Stevan, all in multiple role, create instantly memorable portraits.  Even Alisa Palmer’s Dora-winning direction seems more detailed while the cast’s mastery of Churchill’s difficult technique of overlapping dialogue is stunning.  So rich is the play in meaning and so well-directed and acted is the Soulpepper production that a single visit is not enough to appreciate both Churchill’s achievement and Soulpepper’s.  

©Christopher Hoile

Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2008-10-28.

Photo: Megan Follows, Ann-Marie MacDonald and Cara Pifko. ©Sandy Nicholson.